Not satisfied with just blatantly copying Apple themselves, it seems as if Samsung is out to reward equally as deplorable developers by awarding the top prize in their Smart App Challenge Android app development competition to a game that is an obvious ripoff of the iOS game Overkill from Craneballs Studios.
Craneballs brought this terrible injustice to our attention.
In April of this year, we discovered Gun & Blood for Android was incredibly similar to our iOS app Overkill. And similar is an understatement. The game mechanics and design, the whole idea behind Overkill was shamelessly taken over by feeling touch with only slightly reworked graphics. Previous version of Gun & Blood even used the same text, word for word!
Just how similar are the games?
Samsung bills their Smart App Challenge as a way to “reward the developers of innovative apps”, yet it appears their judging criteria for “winning game” is based solely on highest download count. Samsung should have made out the $200,000 check to Craneballs, as they are the true innovative force behind the game.
Check out this graphical comparison sent to us by Craneballs and see for yourself just how ‘innovative’ the Samsung’s Grand Prize selection, Gun & Blood (from Feeling Touch) really is. They even copied the typos AND CREDITS!!! It if weren’t so sad, it’d be laughable.
Feeling Touch…they’d have better off naming the studio ‘Sticky Fingers’!
Really Samsung, you are going to reward this?!
Craneballs has reached out to Samsung for comment (and an explanation), but so far has not received a reply.
While the iOS ecosystem is not immune to its own fair share of copycat apps, Apple generally does a good job at squashing these down when reported. It is sickening to see Samsung actively rewarding and promoting such behavior and calling it innovative. If this is by chance some misguided attempt to stick it to Apple, you are far from your goal. Instead you are just hurting a hard-working indie developer and sending the wrong message, saying that it’s alright to clone (well, to be fair, you were already sending that message anyways).
Hopefully the guys at Craneballs can get some sort of satisfactory resolution to this ridiculousness.
