As wonderful of a thing as the App Store is, it comes with a heck of a seedy underbelly of unscrupulous developers and I really hate how often it seems like we’re posting these rip-off alerts lately. Shameless clones are one thing, but flat out stealing a game’s assets is an entirely different animal. Today’s victims are the guys from Ironhide Game Studio, who currently have three different Flash games out in the wild. Kingdom Rush is their most popular, which is currently ripping up the charts on the various Flash game portal sites, and is boasting 40 million total plays worldwide. You can add one more to that number by clicking here and checking it out, it’s a pretty cool little tower defense game.
In late July, Ironhide Games released Kingdom Rush, and in the last few weeks of October, My Yayi released the same game on the App Store… Although, you’ll notice that the Ironhide and Armor Games logos have been removed, making the whole thing that much more damning. In fact, if you want to see a ton of other ripped assets, click the above image for a full-size comparison of multiple levels.
The guys from Ironhide Games have already explored all the regular channels to get the game taken down, including sending copyright infringement notices, contacting Apple, and even hiring outside consultants to help get it removed. Yet, it remains. We’ve heard the actual process of getting a stolen game removed can be rather slow from other developers who have experienced similar problems, but it’s no-doubt incredibly painful for the original creators to look at the game up on the App Store in the meantime.
