my game on APPCHINA!. wait, but i didn't publish there

well i goggled my game and it was surprising to see my game on appchina. is it fine or is it piracy?. well i don't know Chinese and i couldn't make anything sensible out of google translate.
anybody publishing there game in appchina?. plz guide me over these issue.i know my game has less downloads and not so popular. but yet a developer would hate to see there own game cracked.right?

playstore link:- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.falcondevelopers.uphillraceoverthesea&hl=en

appchina link:- http://www.appchina.com/app/com.falcondevelopers.uphillraceoverthesea

 

Wow. I'm sure this isn't the only case of this happening. Your game is free to download with IAP, right? My guess would be that someone rigged it so that any purchases in that version of your game went to them instead.

I have no idea whether you'd have any luck in contacting the store and requesting them to remove the app. Maybe Google would be able to help, since it seems that the data was taken directly from their store?

Please keep us updated on how this turns out, though.

 

I think a person almost needs to expect this to happen these days. People are just obsessed with money and do whatever to get it. If many are willing to steal your identity and actually file your state income taxes to get your refund you can imagine how many more would be willing to take games, hack them and publish as their own. This stuff only seems to increase as time passes.

 

I understand that a app or game for Android is only a zip file with java code, then stolen and republish is very easy, I think that games in webGL will be have the same problem, are very easy to stolen.

 

Yeah I have seen a lot of similar things on here, other forums and reddit where peoples games have been "stolen" then all ads are relinked to other accounts/ad system, IAP hooked and rerouted to custom payment systems and etc.

There are tens or hundreds of these sites that download stuff daily from Google Play to their site. Some of them don't change a thing in the app, some replace all profitable things and some even change the name and logo. They do it cause it's easy and it's hard to takedown these places. It's very easy to decompile regular java Android apps and also easy with Unity games running on mono.

I remember one of the post long time ago (don't remember where) having detailed story how two guys found a clone of their game, detailed comparison of what had been done to the game (code, assets) and what happened after. The end was a sad story as nothing was taken down after weeks. They contacted site host, domain owner, site isp and so on without a reply. Finally they went to make a report at police station and report was taken but they were basically said that don't expect anything to happen as it is too expensive to handle such cases where damages/losses are hard to prove (free with ads/iap) and can't be solved without help from authorities at Asia region which can be hard or impossible depending of the country.

 

I had one app stolen and rebranded off Google Play within 24 hours of releasing it. This is why I don't develop for android anymore.

 

Unfortunately this happens on android a lot.

There isnt a way to change the way China approaches copyright infringement, but a good way to get around it is to approach chinese app distribution firms before launch and have it willingly launched with them. You will still get ripped off, but at least you will get some of the revenue.

EDIT: didnt realise last user had bumped a 4 year old thread. My mistake.

 

Is there any way to build protection into your game? Like some sort of locale based check or some other function to basically say if online check if I am a legit version of my game?

 

Well it's not like the problems disappeared.

Game as a service.

 

Yes, but it's only going to stop people who can't be bothered to remove said protection from the game or download copies from people who have done that. To permanently protect your game you basically need to move all of the code that makes decisions onto a remote server.

 

Old thread. But best safety measure, is online server. None however, will be 100% secure. If anyone want to crack and steal, they will. You can make I only harder to do so.