A Chinese-made copycat game, allegedly modeled on the original Korean game, is ironically to be reimported to Korea, provoking a lot of controversy.
The game "World of Fight" developed by Chinese game developer The 9, with whom Neowiz (an internet and online game service company in South Korea) signed a contract to launch the game in Korea. "World of Fight", based on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (a Chinese historical novel), is a horizontal-scrolling action role-playing game (RPG).
Some people have pointed out that the developer of "World of Fight" plagiarized "DunGeon & Fighter", a popular game developed by Neople, since it was unveiled at the China Digital Entertainment Expo (ChinaJoy), held in Shanghai last year. Screenshots of the two games at issue clearly show their close resemblances. "World of Fight" seems like a knock-off of "DunGeon & Fighter" in the following areas: in-game control methods; skills of characters; how to display damage; typography; and how to display out-of-stock items.
Weblogs devoted to DunGeon & Fighter fans have seen their bloggers posting with bitter comments about the outright plagiarism. Some said, "This was a cheap clone." One of the fumed bloggers stated, "There are rankings, style technique percent. This is a bold-faced knockoff." However, Neople, who developed DunGeon & Fighter, responded, "In terms of entertainment value, we do not consider it as our rival. So we couldn't care less." Nexon in charge of providing domestic services agreed, "It is true that the two games are similar, but we won't take any action on this matter." Such a nonchalant response from the parties concerned can be interpreted as their thought-through calculation that any controversy over "World of Fight" could eventually draw more publicity toward it.
Neowiz will release "World of Fight" next year after localization processes are done. Neowiz said, "After careful internal consultations, we reached a conclusion that "World of Fight" has commercial appeal as a game. Since the game has yet to be available, we hope people make their sound judgments after they actually play the game when it is released.
