[Resolved] "Bootleg" Flare on Steam store

[dorkster]

EDIT: This has been resolved: #939 (reply in thread)

It was brought to my attention that someone has uploaded Flare under the name Undead World.

There's a Steam forum thread by someone who also noticed this.

While in bad taste IMHO, I think the GPL might allow for this. But it might be similar to the 0A.D. case, where it was more of an issue of the developer impersonating other developers.

I'm not sure if a DMCA claim would be the right option at the moment. I also don't see a way to contact the dev outside of the Steam forum. So maybe we should be vocal over there?

[Megalomaniak]

It's publisher is listed as the Flare Engine Team so it is giving some credit, albeit in a rather sneaky way. It's also not currently charged any money for and it's listed as early access.

It is possible someone is looking to do a genuine total conversion mod I suppose, but if so I do think they got ahead of themselves and put it up perhaps too soon(note: publishing on steam costs money, no free access to the platform, making it all the weirder). Or maybe there really is something nefarious going on, but I feel there is at least a chance it might not be entirely malicious.

[HoneSundan]

publisher have now become Undead World Team.

What happened?

[dorkster]

No idea. I guess to avoid impersonating us. They did add this line on March 13 according to the SteamDB history:

This project is based on Flare engine, the soruce code and license remains same as engine GNU General Public License v3.0 and CC-BY-SA

And it is visible on the Steam page below the system requirements. Also, it's worth noting that, so far, the uploader has made no changes to the credits/readme files that are included in the depot.

One more interesting thing I noticed: they added depots of MSVC and DirectX for "compatibility". Guess they don't know that we compile the Windows version with MinGW and "force" OpenGL for rendering.

[HoneSundan]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2193420/discussions/0/3784751580941131620/

Maybe the problem has been solved?

[dorkster]

Thanks for posting Clint's update. I missed that.