Viral success (for another person)

VoltekPlay writes on Reddit that it was solely alerted to the existence of My Child or Not! on iOS by “a suspicious burst of site visitors on our itch.io web page—all coming from Google natural search.” Solely after including a “the place did you discover our recreation?” participant ballot to the web page had been the builders made conscious of some popular TikTok videos that includes the iOS model.

“Fortunately, some individuals within the [Tiktok] feedback talked about the true recreation identify—Diapers, Please!—so a number of thousand gamers had been in a position to google their method to our web page,” VoltekPlay writes. “I can solely think about what number of extra ended up on the thief’s App Retailer web page as an alternative.”

Earlier this week, the $2.99 iOS launch of My Child or Not! was quickly climbing iOS’s paid games charts, attracting an estimated 20,000 downloads general, according to Sensor Tower.

Marwane Benyssef’s solely earlier iOS launch, Kiosk Meals Evening Shift, additionally seems to be a direct copy of an itch.io launch.

The App Retailer itemizing credited My Child or Not! to “Marwane Benyssef,” a brand new iOS developer with no obvious historical past within the recreation improvement neighborhood. Benyssef’s solely different iOS recreation, Kiosk Meals Evening Shift, was launched final August and seems to be a direct copy of Kiosk, a pay-what-you-want title that was posted to itch.io last year (with a subsequent “full” release on Steam this 12 months)

In a Reddit post, the group at VoltekPlay mentioned that they’d filed a DMCA copyright declare towards My Child or Not! Apple subsequently shared that declare with Bennysof, VoltekPlay writes, together with a message that “Apple encourages the events to a dispute to work immediately with each other to resolve the declare.”

This morning, Ars reached out to Apple to request a touch upon the scenario. Whereas awaiting a response (which Apple has but to offer), Apple seems to have eliminated Benyssef’s developer web page and all traces of their video games from the iOS App Retailer.