Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 82767 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 414(@200wpm)___ 331(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82767 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 414(@200wpm)___ 331(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
“What happened?” I began, then froze as she burst into tears.
“We’re ruined, Freya. Everything is ruined…” She put her face in her hands, and I looked in panic at my father who had just hung up the phone. My blood had turned to ice, and for a second I thought I might collapse.
“No answer! What do we pay lawyers for?” he muttered, reaching out his hand to cover Mom’s. He smiled at me, and his attempt at being reassuring had the opposite effect. I could feel the adrenaline surging through my body as I racked my brain to try to work out what could have gone wrong.
“It’s Animagic. It’s been ripped off,” my mom said, blowing her nose noisily.
“But how? We haven’t released anything yet!”
I was almost relieved; the game couldn’t possibly have been ripped off, they had to have made a mistake. We had been working on Animagic for six months, twelve if you count when my dad had his first ideas. It was our biggest project to date. We had put everything we had into production and taken a business loan to invest in a massive marketing campaign that was due to launch over the weekend.
“Here,” Beatrix had come back into the room, and she thrust a tablet into my hand. She was quiet now, the anger all gone and her face pale under her perfect makeup. I looked at her quizzically and then focused on the game loading on the screen. A series of beautifully animated characters tumbled onto the screen, and the menu opened. I explored the options, finding a tutorial that seamlessly walked me through the introduction to a game called Cre8ure. Each time I pressed the arrow to move to the next screen my heart sank a little further. Cre8ure was Animagic. Sure, visually it was different – there was no trace of my artwork, but the concept was virtually identical. Players had to earn, collect, and amalgamate creatures with different characteristics to move successfully through a series of habitats. Everything that made Animagic different and appealing had been copied. The unique mixture of action gameplay, strategic thinking, and compelling collections was our unique selling point.
I was speechless. I handed the tablet back to my sister and looked blankly at my mother who had made coffee and was sliding mugs across the table.
“We don’t know how it happened,” Dad said solemnly. “We have only just spoken to the receptionist at the lawyer’s office. They were meant to be getting back to us, but now there’s no answer. It’s a gray area…”
“A gray area?” I stood up. It was my turn to react, and I was consumed with anger. “How the hell can this be a gray area? It is a blatant breach of… of copyright! It is entirely stolen!”
“Not visually. The artwork, the script, the characters, they are all different. And the concept could be just different enough to make it acceptable. At any rate, it doesn’t look like a sure thing in court…” Beatrix said ruefully, sipping her coffee and closing her eyes.
“We don’t know what to do, how it happened, or whether we will even ever know…” Mom added, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex.
“So, what we do is we release!” I said, sloshing some of my coffee onto the tabletop as I gestured to the promotional artwork for the game on the wall. “We release and compete with it. This doesn’t take away from the fact that we have a great product on our hands. I say we let it speak for itself.”
“Freya,” Beatrix sighed. “You don’t understand. Our app is going to look like a cheap copy. It’s Clover House. We cannot compete. The one thing we had going for us was the concept, and now they have used that. They are offering free in-app purchases for the first three months; you can even earn real-life merchandise. There’s a range of fucking stuffed animals, for fuck’s sake!”
Beatrix earned herself a shocked look from our mother and she fell silent, shuffling through paperwork and pointing things out to Dad in a low voice.
“Beatrix thinks there might be a risk of Clover House suing us for copying them if we release,” my mom said quietly.
“They wouldn’t have the balls!” my dad was saying.
Beatrix looked at me with grim determination, and I knew she wouldn’t say a lawsuit wasn’t a possibility if she hadn’t checked out the facts.
I closed my eyes for a second, my heart sinking anew. Clover House were the big boys. They were based in Boston like us, but they had international offices, a fancy new skyscraper, and ruthless lawyers. They had made a pretty persuasive attempt to buy out Dynasty Games a couple of years back. We had resisted and continued to carve out our own niche with small-scale quirky games and educational apps aimed at kids while Clover House brought out a string of massively successful products with a more widespread appeal.