Painful Helplessness: When Integrity is Pushed Aside for Money

If you haven’t played Vlambeer’s Radical Fishing you owe it to yourself to play one of the most wholly original little games ever. The premise is best experienced than described as the rad Brandon Boyer once sort of said of the game.

The developer was stoked to get into re-developing the game for iOS with all new gorgeous graphics (seen above) and tighter gameplay, and so Zach Gage of Vlambeer teamed up with Greg from aeiowu. However, little did they know that while they were prepping and designing Ridiculous Fishing, that a shameless and disgusting clone of their was dropping on the App Store by a small company called Gamenauts.

The ripoff game is called Ninja Fishing and features precisely the same exact gameplay and scoring system as the original Radical Fishing and Ridiculous Fishing.

Greg from aeiowu wrote the following heartbreaking lines in an open letter to Gamenauts.

“But now, I’ve lost that. I wake up and I can’t think of working on Ridiculous Fishing without being reminded of this ugliness. It confuses me and stops me in my tracks. There are chunks of time, maybe 20 minutes, where I can work away and try to forget about Gamenauts and Ninja Fishing. Those are nice but have been getting more infrequent.

Today, was especially hard. Ninja Fishing reached #7 on overall apps in the app store and it upset me more than I thought anything in this business could. I broke down.”

He then bravely goes on to declare that “It’s ok. It’s gotta be ok.” He has decided that he needs to forgive Gamenauts for what they’ve done as not to be consumed by confusion and hate inside of him.

“When we release Ridiculous Fishing, I have no idea how it’s going to do but I’m sure there will be plenty of people calling us the copycats and that’s going to hurt. A lot.”

That last line makes me tear up a bit.

I hope that Gamenauts just pulls the game, and takes their money. I doubt they will, but that is the best I could ask for right now, and unfortunately the most realistic.

It probably won’t happen.

If you haven’t bought Ninja Fishing, please do not buy it. The people who have bought it and continue buying don’t know better. Please forgive them too, and don’t be angry with the customers who don’t read about games, but just play them, and trust that nothing shady and awful is going on.

If you have bought Ninja Fishing - leave the bastards a terrible review.

They deserve whatever is comin’ to ‘em.

They disgust me.

- Kyle