Hey, I just wanted to thank you for your overwhelming support here for my last post: I’m a dev who has been working on my game for 2 years and my game title got stolen on Steam and they plan to release before I do. What should I do?
Quick summary of the situation: I’ve been working on my game called The Milgram Experiment for a while now and last week I found out a game with the exact same title was recently added to Steam. I wasn’t sure what to do and never considered such a scenario because I always thought that Valve would just prevent you from using a name of a game that already exists. I got a lot of comments with people recommending me to contact Steam, to trademark the name worldwide or to even to try and contact the other dev.
Resolution: The other game has now officially changed its name to The Obedience Experiment.
How: The other dev actually saw my posts across social media and reached out to me and explained that it was a coincidence and he is very open to changing the name (since my game had the title for 2 years). Our talk was genuine and I felt there was no malice on his part. So it’s all good now!
Feel free to wishlist both games if you like what you see:
The Milgram Experiment on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2719670/The_Milgram_Experiment
The Obedience Experiment on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4777470/The_Obedience_Experiment/
Thanks for helping out a little indie dev and please tell me what do you think of both games? Which title is more catchy? Any feedback is more than welcome :)
I feel like this was a coordinated marketing stunt. This developer is known to collect popular memes and release them in a bundle as a new post in imgur. After the posts get popular on the site, weblinks to his button game were added in for advertisement. Based on this history, I don’t trust this story about the new game.
Edit: If you don’t believe me, do a websearch with
site:imgur.com https://store.steampowered.com/app/2336120/Do_Not_Press_The_Button_Or_Youll_Delete_The_Multiverse/This conspiracy theory appeals to my complete lack of trust for the world.
Making a whole other game to promote mine seems way to complicated instead of actually marketing it. I have the DM’s from the other dev I can show them to you if you want.
Doesn’t mean you didn’t organize this with a developer, which is free marketing for him too. At this point, there is nothing that you could do or provide to convince me. I’m sorry if I’m wrong, but after the previous games marketing style as described, I do not trust you.