When Abhi Swaminathan opened up a mobile cooking game called Sofra, his first reaction was to be amused.
He thought it looked extremely similar to his own narrative cooking game, Venba — with a few critical changes.
“The assets I saw in the game were pretty one-to-one. They were lifted, and in my eyes, they were kind of sanitized,” he said.
Swaminathan, founder and director of Toronto-based Visai Games, put out Venba in 2023.
In his game, players take on the role of an Indian mother who immigrates to Canada in the 1980s. Her recipe book is damaged, and as players re-create Tamil meals, they learn about the family at the centre of the game.
“The story is about love, family and loss,” Swaminathan said.
Sofra, meanwhile, is a cooking simulation game that came out this year that removes any narrative elements, instead letting users make dishes like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or pancakes.
In late June, Visai Games fired off a social media post accusing Sofra of being a “rip-off” that excised themes like “dealing with racism” — leading to comments from frustrated Venba fans and posts on video game blogs pointing out the similar aesthetics of the two games.
Swaminathan ultimately decided not to take any legal action, citing the frequency with which video game elements are taken by other creators, and the challenge of pursuing the companies responsible for Sofra, which are based in Europe.
“It’s simply not worth it for us,” he said.
Sofra creator denies any theft
Across the Atlantic, Moldova-based Alex Baboglo denies that his team did anything wrong when they put out Sofra.
Baboglo is CEO of the companies that put out the game, Global Advertising Network Ltd. and WorkPoint.
He said that Sofra was created by three teenagers as part of an in-house game development program, and that while the trio “took inspiration” from other games, everything in their product “was created by our internal designers from scratch.”
Lawyer Jay Kerr-Wilson, who heads up the copyright practice group at law firm Fasken, told CBC Toronto that copying the “look and feel” of a video game is not legally protected.
“Where you could cross the line is if you copy specific creative elements from a game,” he said.
Kerr-Wilson said there’s “almost no litigation on these kinds of cases” in Canada, both because it’s commonplace for developers to borrow from each other and because bringing litigation is both expensive and, when the case crosses borders, complex.
He said game developers who want to protect their work can opt to file a copyright registration with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and file a trademark for any distinctive features like names, logos or branding.
Sharing can be done ‘in good faith’
Though Venba creator Swaminathan believes the team behind Sofra have “purely financial motivations,” he said many of the instances of game creators borrowing from one another are a “healthy” part of his industry.
“Let’s say a game comes out, and then another game takes the mechanic and improves on it,” he explained. “As long as it’s done in good faith, people are happy about it, and that’s kind of how the medium progresses.”
That tracks with what Kris Alexander, a Toronto Metropolitan University professor who teaches game design, has observed.
“It’s fairly common” to see similar elements pop up in different games, he said.
In some cases, Alexander said, it’s done as a way of honouring a beloved game, for example farming game Stardew Valley, which he described as a “love letter” and “spiritual successor” to 1996’s Harvest Moon.
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In other instances, cases of similar games lead to plagiarism accusations or even litigation — for example Sony’s decision last month to sue rival game company Tencent for creating what it describes as a “slavish clone” to its Horizon series.
“The waters can be a bit muddy,” said Alexander. “Because we don’t know how many people are trying to pay homage, and how many people are trying to make a quick dollar.”
