“In order to recover for infringement from a clone developer, the original developer would have to show either actual copying or that the two games are so strikingly similar that one basically must be a clone of the other,” Huffman explains. Bringing a rival developer to court over a clone isn’t an inexpensive process and, sometimes, it’s simply not feasible. The app stores themselves can be prickly to work with. There are few things a developer can do to combat a clone, because of how Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests work. Most clone developers know this and so they avoid taking specific art or sound assets and try to build, from scratch, a similar game – albeit usually a crappier version.”

“Individual assets (like specific art, music, etc.) are. “Game ideas or mechanics are not protectable under copyright law,” says Odin Law and Media founder Brandon Huffman. The worst part is that unless the cloner rips off art assets, sounds, or the title, the practice dances just on this side of the legal line. The practice of cloning has been going on for years. It’s hard to be genteel about the behavior though, when the culprit touts a massive influx of cash from a Wall Street investment bank.

It’s what you say in polite company when you don’t want to outright accuse someone of stealing your game idea and rushing a slipshod version to market. Sounds familiar, right? That’s because “Hole.io” is a “clone.” There’s a game out there right now on iOS and Android called “ Hole.io.” Players take on the role of holes and swallow up the world around them. When it does release, some people are going to be confused.

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