For years, a subject fraught with arguments concerning legality and ethics has surrounded the cloning of video games. Some allegations center on the recent runaway success My Baby or Not! that possibly crossed the fine line between imitation and outright code theft from class-A indie web game Diapers, Please!
Less than five days before its commercial birth in the Apple App Store, the free-to-play HTML5 game Diapers, Please! was uploaded to itch.io on February 23. This game was developed by five members of VoltekPlay during a week-long game jam.
A mere matter of picking a baby representing certain visual traits of two defined parents while encased in some dollops of totalitarian aesthetics (Papers, Please, anyone?) is the entire game in a nutshell.
Three days later, on the App Store, My Baby or Not! was not just similar but a strikingly identical copy of Diapers, Please! in screenshots and gameplay. Not only this but both of these contained the same text in their description.
The description read, “Step into an alternate 1920s universe where a totalitarian regime and meticulous bureaucracy hide dark secrets. As the Custodian of Bloodlines in a maternity ward ravaged by fire, your mission is to manually match newborns with their parents.”
The VoltekPlay team began to notice unexplained spikes in their traffic on itch.io, all arriving through Google searches. Finally, after creating an online survey asking players where they found their game, the developers soon revealed that several popular TikTok videos discussing the app had been widely circulated.
It was shared by VoltekPlay, “Fortunately, some TikTok users mentioned the actual game name—Diapers, Please!—allowing a few thousand players to find their way to our page.” It was further added, “I can only speculate how many others ended up on the thief’s App Store listing instead.”
