About a week and a half ago we reported on Stolen Couch Games who pushed out a press release detailing possible plans to take action against one of their partners in regards to a game that was released called Pazuru and the fact that it was a clone of another game on Android called Ichi. Since then some new details have come to light which solves the entire issue at hand and, as a result, has Stolen Couch Games pushing out a new blog post retracting everything they said as well as issuing an apology.
In case you missed the original post regarding this, you can check it out here. In a nutshell though, basically Stolen Couch Games accused one of their partners, Jay van Hutten, of releasing a clone of a game called Ichi which was a partnership between Stolen Couch Games and Van Hutten. The game in question was called Pazuru which was released onto the Nintendo 3DS and, according to Stolen Couch, was done so behind their backs. Stolen Couch Games was considering legal action against Van Hutten and also put out a press release stating as much as well as calling out Van Hutten. As it turns out, the entire issue is a mistake.
Here is the official blog post. It’s short and to the point:
Last week, we released a furious press release about Pazuru, a new puzzle game by Jay van Hutten. We said our partner Jay van Hutten released an Ichi-game behind our backs, among other things.
Today, we eat our words.
So what changed, after last weeks kerfuffle? Jay showed us an old email in which we were notified about Jay’s intentions (namely, making an Ichi-style game for the Nintendo 3DS, that was sufficiently different from Ichi visually, in order to avoid confusion).
Put quite simply: we had forgotten about that email. It’s that simple. And we feel incredibly stupid. We saw Pazuru, we got angry and caused a scene – when the right thing to do would have been to count to ten and call Jay.
We’ve contacted Jay since, and we’re currently engaged in a productive discussion about Pazuru, our business agreements and Ichi’s future. We still think the whole game development community should have a good, long talk about Intellectual property copyright, but for different reasons than before.
We regret falsely accusing Jay, and encourage you to play Pazuru for 3DS if you get the chance. – Stolen Couch Games
So, a couple of people have learned a valuable lesson it seems. There is, however, always room to talk about Intellectual Property and copyrights. It is a topic developers should always be considering when making a game. It is also good to make sure you have your bases covered before calling someone out in public.
Website Referenced: Stolen Couch Games
