BKGM, a game developer, in November 2014 launched into the market the mobile game  Halloween Nightmare running on Windows Phone operating system. The game immediately caught special attention from the gamers’ community with 50,000 downloads reported.

Recently, the game developers found that a Chinese game firm copied Halloween Nightmare and posted the game in Chinese language on the internet. The game has become very popular in China with hundreds of downloads from Windows Store in China every day.

According to BKGM, the game was developed by its 13 members, all are from Hanoi University. After a short time of hitting the market, it turned into Halloween Nightmare Adventure, distributed by Atom Boog, a Chinese firm.

BKGM’s members, after checking the version distributed by Atom Boog, came to the conclusion that there was no big difference between the original Halloween Nightmare and Halloween Nightmare Adventure, except advert pieces and the Chinese language.

This means that the product of BKGM’s has been “stolen” by Atom Boog for commercial purposes.

However, having a product stolen has not been the worst thing to happen to BKGM. 

For a couple of weeks, BKGM made every effort to contact state agencies and ask for help to claim the game back. However, the agencies have not replied. 

Several experienced individuals in the Vietnamese game community advised BKGM to report the infringement to Google and download app stores, so that the stores can prevent the illegal action by the Chinese firm.

An analyst said if BKGM and the Chinese firm could discuss ways to cooperate for profit. If not, BKGM will have to “sit down under abuse”, because no agency or organization will come forward and support BKGM to get the game back.

Game distributors said that stolen products are quite common in the Vietnamese digital content market.

A game distributor in Hanoi noted that Vietnamese digital content firms, like Chinese, also copy others’ products illegally.

Some days ago, the Vietnamese game community was stirred up by the discovery that a Vietnamese game firm marketed a product which has 90 percent of content similar to a product from China.

However, the game developer insisted on its innocence, denying the accusation.

The analyst noted that if Vietnamese firms copy other products, they will also see their products illegally copied.

NLD