Update: Inmiddels heeft Rami Ismail van Vlambeer met een Engelstalige e-mail gereageerd op de berichtgeving dat er een game is die sterk op Luftrausers lijkt. In de mail geeft hij aan dat Vlambeer contact gaat opnemen met Google en Apple om te kijken of er iets aan de kwestie gedaan kan worden, zonder dat Vlambeer zich zelf met de kwestie moet bezighouden. De gehele e-mail is onderaan dit nieuwsbericht te vinden.
Origineel bericht: Via Twitter heeft Rami Ismail van Vlambeer reeds kort gereageerd op de kwestie: "Ik zit in een trein in het buitenland en het is compleet onmogelijk voor mij in de Luftrauser-kloonkwestie te duiken de komende paar uur. God, niet dit weer."
Luftrausers verscheen eerder al als gratis PC-game (toen nog onder de naam Luftrauser), maar is de afgelopen maanden doorontwikkeld om opnieuw voor PC te verschijnen, evenals voor PlayStation 3 en PS Vita. Een iOS- en Android-versie lijkt uitgesloten, valt te lezen in de reactie van Ismail.
Het is inmiddels al de derde keer dat er van een Vlambeer-titel een kloon opduikt. Super Crate Box kreeg die in de vorm van Insane Zombie Carnage en voordat Ridiculous Fishing voor iOS verscheen, was het vergelijkbare Ninja Fishing al voor het platform beschikbaar. Vlambeer brengt zijn games vaak eerst uit als gratis browsergames, om vervolgens pas met doorontwikkelde, betaalde versies te komen. De klonen verschenen steeds in de periode daartu en.
Het e-mailbericht van Rami Ismail, verstuurd aan verschillende media waaronder Gamer.nl:
We obviously endured a bit of a scare when news arrived of LUFTRAUSERS being cloned and released ahead of our own release schedule by another developer. This time, however, it's not 'just' the idea of the game that has been cloned, but also the visual style. This gives us much more room to fight the whole thing, and we fully intend to. The developer of the clone has gotten in touch with us after Twitter exploded and let us know that 'acttuly we genrated our a ets, Codes and all newly' and that the gameplay as indicated on the screenshots 'is not there in game as in the screen shots. We just done those screnshots for public attraction'. They signed off with the note that 'we really dont think it links your game at all'.
We simply can't deal with the stre of another cloned game, so we've gotten in touch with Apple and Google to see if there is a way for for the i ue to be resolved without us getting involved in yet another clone war. We're more than happy to see games inspired by our works and we encourage anyone to practice game design and development by recreating personal favorites - but the clones of both Ridiculous Fishing and LUFTRAUSERS take 'inspiration' a step too far and into the marketplace. We're extremely exhausted from dealing with cloning and even though this is an important i ue to stand up against, we had hoped that we could just release a game without the cloning debate happening for once.
Ultimately, we refuse to accept this as a part of our industry. We believe that showing our games to our fans early is a better way of developing Vlambeer games than keeping secrets and just dropping the final result on people when it's done.
Now that we've got the chance, we'd also like to take a few seconds to use the clone as an argument towards why LUFTRAUSERS is almost certainly not coming to mobile - we just can't find a way to make it work as well as it should on touchscreen devices. LUFTRAUSERS is still hitting PC, Mac, Linux, Playstation 3 and Playstation Vita - with the latter being the most interesting device for those of you who would like to play LUFTRAUSERS on the go. We've been wrapping up development and we are on schedule to release the game later this spring.
Thank you so much once again to the fans, friends and pre that have helped us out with Ridiculous Fishing and thanks so much to everyone for standing with us once again with LUFTRAUSERS. We hope this will be the last time we have to deal with this, but we're encouraged to know that if it's not, we won't be alone.
P.S. We really like the idea of a Vlambeer clone game jam (https://twitter.com/folmerkelly/status/326393858332180480) - we might organize that after we're done crunching on LUFTRAUSERS.
Thanks,
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Rami & JW