Plant Wars

So a few months ago, this guy named Oli joined Plant Wars. I noticed that he had a Buskerwars e-mail address, so I asked him if he was a developer on that project. He said he was, and we had a friendly chat about game development. Busker, by the way, is a British word for a street performer.

It should be noted here that Buskerwars is a clone derivative from Hobowars. It’s been changed around some, everything is awfully similar. Even the terms of service: see here and here. To give more damning evidence, compare the screen shots of the Hobowars’ city with Buskerwars’ town:

Hobowars' City

Now make sure to note the remarkable similarities; the introductory texts’ differences are particularly amusing:

Buskerwars' Town

You can see that there are certainly different (or at least renamed) areas of the games, but the similarities are undeniable.

Anyway, the above was just to establish the background of the guys who ripped off Plant Wars. He copied all images from plantwars.com – from the main, large logo on the log in page, to the images of the various types of plants, to the weapons and armor pictures. These were all created specifically for plantwars.com and were original artwork.

To give a simple illustration on how he based his work on mine – and then, yes, admittedly, added improvements, let’s look at some screenshots again.

First, the original:

Plant Wars Fertilize Page

And now here’s the Facebook version:

Facebook Rip Off Grow Page

Did he improve on the design some? Sure. Add some nice things like the graphical bars indicating how full your fertilizer (“energy”) is? Sure. Is it a copy of my work? Sure looks like it to me. And then he slapped a bunch of ads all over it (we just have one nondescript AdSense bar at the bottom of our pages if you’re not a donator).

If anyone would like more screenshots, I have some.

The story does have a happy ending though – Plant Wars on Facebook is no more. While Facebook did not respond when I reported the application as infringing upon copyright, they took the clone offline very quickly when it started spamming ALL the friends of anyone who added it. Check out the usage statistics from AllFacebook:

The application went from 124 active users on February 22 to 23,685 on February 25. Spamming does, apparently, work. Horrifically effective results, and it really makes me wish I knew just how much spam the application sent out. Absolutely ridiculous, and sort of amazing.

On February 26, the Facebook Plant Wars had zero users – because it no longer was available on the platform. Spamming is a much more efficient way to get Facebook to kick you off than having someone complain that you stole all their stuff, apparently. On February 25, plantwars.com had 232 new users register (compared to the average of around 10 a day). While I wish more had come over, it was certainly a perk.

This has motivated me to get a couple of books on developing for the Facebook Platform, however, to try and save our reputation on the site. The inherent viral marketing that goes along with it would be nice as well (as all friends of an individual are notified when he adds a new application, for example).

There are at least five anti-Plant Wars groups on Facebook, although most of them are in Italian (such as “Un grandissimo fanculo a plantwars,” which translates to “A big fuck to plantwars”). It wasn’t us, guys, promise!