Do not cry about someone stealing your game

The industry really is ruthless. You can say “but this is immoral” as much as you like, but you have to look at it as a pragmatist, without forgetting that we live under a capitalist order and that this is a trade in the end. The idea being yours means nothing. There has to be a finished product in front of you, and that product has to have been taken 1 to 1, before you can really call it theft. Beyond that, the most you can do is write a LinkedIn, Reddit or Twitter post. The market always rewards whoever arrives at the market in good shape.

This line was thrown at me too, back in the day. I used to run a community. One kid took free design help from us almost every week for six months, and the game did not look like it was ever going to be finished, but I helped anyway rather than turn him away. Then a similar game came out of that community, one I had nothing to do with. After that, people with no connection to any of it wrote pages and pages about the community. Even people whose game was barely more than an itch.io demo wrote nonsense like “you copied it directly” and “you would copy our games too”. If you are showing a game anywhere, you have to be ready for similar games to be made and for finishing your own. And if you cannot finish it over a long stretch, you will not cry about the ones that came out before you. There will always be people who remember.

In this industry the idea has no importance. What matters is whether you can bring that idea to life, and how you operate while you do it. Yes, getting to market first is a relatively advantaged position, but when you get in with a better product than the one that went first, you take a bigger multiplier. If the game that came out before you did well, you get market validation for free. If it failed, you absorb the places where it sank, fix them, and put out a much better product. If you both do well, you make a bundle and reach more players. And if you came out later and failed, nothing would have changed even if you had been first. Almost no game’s audience overlaps 100% with another’s, and even if it did, there are enough players on Steam for 20 to 30 games.

Know this as well, game mechanics are not protected by copyright in the first place. What is protected is not the mechanic, it is the concrete form of that mechanic. Art, text, audio, the specific visual layout. Idea, procedure, process, system and method of operation are written into the text of the law itself as outside protection, and game mechanics sit inside that list. The lawsuit Tetris filed in 2012 showed how hard that line is. The other side argued exactly this in court, I meticulously copied only the unprotected parts, meaning the mechanics and the way they work. The court accepted it. The man still lost, but not because he took the mechanics, because he took the look as well. If he had taken the mechanics and changed the look, he would have won.

If you are curious about the market price of protection, look at Palworld. The game sold 30.5 million copies and did 700 million dollars gross. The damages Nintendo and the Pokémon Company asked from it came to 10 million yen in total, roughly 66 thousand dollars. One ten-thousandth of the revenue. On top of that the case is not even copyright, it is a patent case, and in November 2025 the claim was narrowed to the old versions from before the patch, so the Palworld you play today is completely outside the legal risk. The conclusion here is not that Nintendo is weak. This is the protection in the hands of the strongest IP holder in the industry. Think about what is in yours.

This month has its own version of it, PVKK and Iron Nest. PVKK was spoken about as the game that named the genre, all the hype was built on it, and it was pushed to 2027. Iron Nest came out on 6 August at 9.99 dollars, with 6,871 reviews and 97% positive in three weeks. The developer wrote in his own words that he was influenced by PVKK, nobody sued, and nobody would have won if they had. The real point is this, on PVKK’s own Steam forum there is a thread opened with the title “play Iron Nest if you cannot wait”. The waiting audience of the game that is supposedly being copied is doing the other one’s marketing. And there is one reason for it, one is a finished product and the other is still a page.

Do not take go ahead and copy out of this either, because the part that can be copied is not the part doing the work. You have one real protection, and it is that whoever copies you can only see what shows from the outside. He takes your Steam page, he takes your trailer, he takes your first ten minutes. He cannot take why the game works, because you only learned that yourself after making it. I said do not assume you have figured out a game at first glance, and the copier is making exactly that mistake. That is why most clones fail.

The same thing is happening to me right now. Metal Thunder is a gunship game and it has a style of its own. Drone Sector came out earlier, the two of us appeared at almost the same time, and on a few features we even inspired each other. Right now another Turkish developer is making a similar game, and frankly it does not look bad at all. As long as he does not copy a feature or the visual language one to one, it is not a problem for me, because every new game that enters the gunship niche brings visibility to me too. I am already one of the games leading that niche.