I have been working for over 2 years on my game and 4 months ago I finally released my demo. Yesterday, while searching on Steam I found a game with EXACTLY the same title and very similar premise. The page was created in May or June 2026 and they aim to release in August 2026. Here are some of descriptions I use on my Steam page:

  • A first-person psychological thriller with a heavy atmosphere and elements of liminal horror.

  • Uncover the stories of your subjects by studying their personal items and darkest secrets before making life-or-death choices.

  • Will you sacrifice your own beliefs to obey HIS authority?

For comparison here is how they describe their game:

“Will you obey orders, or resist? In this first-person psychological horror game, you sit across from subjects and must investigate evidence to determine who is telling the truth, and decide their fate.”

My game is planned to release in October or whenever it’s completely playtested and polished. I’m not sure what I can do as this has never happened before, what do you think is my best course of action here?

For reference my game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2719670/The_Milgram_Experiment

And the copy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4777470/The_Milgram_Experiment/

  • RabbitBBQ@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    What was unique about the PUBG / Unreal Engine situation is that Epic had only used the Unreal Engine for things like Unreal Tournament. They have a large set of customers who license their engine. When PUBG, which was originally created as an Arma mod (like DayZ), was moved to a standalone company by PlayerUnknown, they began looking for engines to rapidly rebuild what made Arma special. The bullet physics, look of the engine, environment and so on. They chose the Unreal engine.

    PUBG took off as soon as the demo was released. There was an ongoing business relationship where PUBG developers worked with the Unreal engine developers to add features to the developer tools, and changes to the engine, to support features that PUBG needed. These changes of course were merged back into the main Unreal engine branch, and this allowed Epic to take the work for a battle royale game from the business association with PUBG, and rapidly cash in on the battle royale craze with Fortnite. It probably only took them 14 days to create it with all the work that PUBG had funded with modfying the engine too.

    That’s what is different about this, versus just a company creating a clone. It was a dangerous thing to do from Epic’s point of view too because I’m sure there could be cases where other customers could see the engine company help them create an initial product, and then use that work to rip them off with a clone.

    From a business practice standpoint, this is similar to what Amazon did with Amazon Basics. Where Amazon became the main, or only, online marketplace for many products. They ran reports and data to find which third party products were selling well on their site… And then they set up stuff like Amazon Basics to essentially copy them. Eventually due to the price and shipping advantage, and the Amazon name, the original products get replaced. And it feeds into Amazons profits.

    Now with AI, all someone has to do is find out which games are popular and then drop some money on tokens to try to vibe code a competing game.