Backrooms games have quickly become a staple of the horror genre. If you check on Steam, there are hundreds to choose from, which, despite looking similar thanks to their setting, can be different in a couple of minor ways. However, there are at least two Backrooms games that are pretty much identical
Steelkrill's game, The Backrooms 1998, was released last week and has had a pretty good reception with a 'Very Positive' review rating on Steam. The game takes a more narrative approach to the Backrooms as it follows a young teen who has fallen into the liminal space. It also uses a camcorder to add a lost-footage vibe to the already creepy atmosphere.
After the successful initial launch on Steam, the solo dev Steelkrill decided that now was a great time to branch out to other consoles. Everything was going according to plan until one player contacted Steelkrill to ask why their game was already on consoles but under a different name. Steelkrill went to check it out, and that's how they found out that someone had ripped their entire game.
"A big scam company just stole my whole game from Steam, ripped it, and sold it as their own on Playstation and other consoles," Steelkrill says. "They stole the whole game as it is alongside the music, sounds, voice lines and everything else. They only changed the monster and the picture on the frame, lol."
Steelkrill even linked a walkthrough of their game alongside the supposed copycat from Cool Devs, so players could decide for themselves how similar the games were. Although the copycat trailer has now been taken down, there's still a ton of pictures that show a side by side comparison, and they look pretty damning. The copycat has seemingly ripped at least sections of the game; the only difference is that they are slightly brighter.
A big scam company just stole my whole game from steam, ripped it and sold it as their own on Playstation and other consoles. from r/gamedev
Steelkrill has already submitted a DMCA and is working alongside their publisher and lawyer and is now trying to figure out the next step: "For now, the game is taken down from PlayStation and Xbox, but it's still up on Nintendo Switch."
Looking at Cool Devs's Nintendo Store page, it seems like they have a knack for taking popular Steam games and passing copies off as their own. There's TCG Empire: Card Shop Simulator, which strikes a remarkable resemblance to TCG Card Shop Simulator and was published just a few months after its release. And then there's Chained Towards Heaven, which looks an awful lot like Chained Together.
"If you can report the fake game, that would be awesome," Steelkrill says. "If you bought it by mistake, please see if you can get a refund. If you can share this, that would be awesome as well, so more people will know about this and not get tricked. I will try my best to post this to other subreddits to make more people aware."
But the end goal of this isn't to reap any financial awards or get monetary compensation; it seems like Steelkrill just wants the record to be set straight: "I don't even want the money they stole. I just want them to refund them back to the buyers if we can somehow catch them. This is not fair to developers and not fair to the players. I still can't believe that someone as big as Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo is letting this slide. It's sad."
It's true that backroom games can all seem very similar. There's not a whole lot of zhuzhing up you can do in an abstract chain store hallway from Wisconsin that is meant to be eerily empty. But even so, different games can look and play differently depending on the style. I've played a few different Backrooms games, and in some way, they've all had distinguishable qualities. There's Inside the Backrooms, which gives off The Stanley Parable vibes; Backrooms: Escape Together, which has more glossy, realistic graphics and a couple of unique areas; and Escape the Backrooms, which offers loads of different areas and modes. So there's really no excuse to have two identical Backroom games, regardless of how mundane the source material is.
