Indie dev baffled after acquaintance clones his game, puts it on Steam, and acts like it's no big deal: 'Happens every day homie'

When he started chatting with Terry Brash, indie game developer kindanice thought he was just swapping tips with a fellow dev. He didn't know that his new acquaintance was going to take his whole game, too.

Kindanice related this story to PC Gamer over DMs this week, and shared screenshots of his conversations with Brash, who did not respond to a request for comment. 

The two developers first chatted a little over a year ago: kindanice was a fan of Brash's game Gunrun, and Brash was a fan of kindanice's game Dire Decks, a deckbuilding shooter combo published on itch.io. The developers swapped some coding knowledge and Brash invited kindanice to his game dev Discord server.

A year passed, and then this week, Brash sent kindanice a Discord DM to share some cool news: He'd cloned Dire Decks in a new engine, added some new features, renamed it Wildcard, and put it on Steam under his own name.

This isn't one of those gray area situations where one game derives its basic design from another, but brings its own look and spirit to the table. One game is clearly a copy of the other, and Brash himself called Wildcard a «clone» of Dire Decks when he introduced it to kindanice.

Kindanice was taken aback: flattered, perhaps, but confused. He asked Brash if he really thought it was OK to take the art and concept of Dire Decks and put it on Steam under his own name without permission. Now Brash seemed taken aback: He pointed out that the code was original and that he'd redrawn the artwork, and asked if kindanice wanted an «inspiration» credit.

«Bro… there's 'inspiration' and then there's blatantly copying an entire game,» kindanice replied.

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The question of whether copyright law protected Dire Decks came up. Brash wasn't sure it did, but admitted he wasn't a lawyer. Kindanice felt he had a case, but changed tack, telling Brash that, regardless of what the law says, copying his game