What's yours is mine Literally just a copyhit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft Web game illicitly "wrapped in a mobile shell" climbed the paid App Store charts. Kyle Orland Mar 6, 2025 6:46 pm | 7 Like stealing gaming from a baby. Like stealing gaming from a baby. Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreHere at Ars, we've written frequently about the video game industry's ongoing problem with blatant game cloning, and the shifting legal and ethical landscape around the issue. But we've rarely seen a case of alleged game theft as blatant as the one surrounding recent iOS App Store hit My Baby or Not!, which appears to cross the line from mere cloning into outright code theft of recent indie web game Diapers, Please!.The small, five-person development team at VoltekPlay created Diapers, Please! as part of a recent one-week Game Jam. The game was posted as a free-to-play HTML5 release on itch.io on February 23, featuring simple gameplay that involves choosing a baby that matches the visual traits of two pictured parents (with a little bit of Papers, Please-style authoritarian styling to boot).Three days later, on February 26, My Baby or Not! appeared on the App Store, with screenshots and gameplay that looked not just similar but downright identical to the Diapers, Please! web release. The two games even shared the same description:Immerse yourself in an alternative 1920s world where a totalitarian state and impeccable bureaucracy conceal deep secrets. You are the Custodian of Bloodlines at a maternity ward where a fire has destroyed all records, and now your task is to manually match newborns with their parents. A portion of the itch.io page for Diapers, Please!. VoltekPlay / Itch.ioA portion of the itch.io page for Diapers, Please!.VoltekPlay / Itch.io The App Store page for My Baby or Not!, as it appeared Thursday morning. Note the identical game description and matching screenshot from the Diapers, Please! page, and the "#2 in Casual" App Store ranking. Apple / Kyle Orland The App Store page for My Baby or Not!, as it appeared Thursday morning. Note the identical game description and matching screenshot from the Diapers, Please! page, and the "#2 in Casual" App Store ranking. Apple / Kyle Orland A portion of the itch.io page for Diapers, Please!.VoltekPlay / Itch.ioThe App Store page for My Baby or Not!, as it appeared Thursday morning. Note the identical game description and matching screenshot from the Diapers, Please! page, and the "#2 in Casual" App Store ranking. Apple / Kyle Orland By Wednesday, the developers of Diapers, Please! took to their itch.io devlog to allege that the version on the iOS App Store is "literally just a copy of our itch.io version, wrapped in a mobile shell." That apparently unauthorized port was "done without our permission, and the person who uploaded it did not contribute to the development in any way," VoltekPlay writes.Viral success (for someone else)VoltekPlay writes on Reddit that it was only alerted to the existence of My Baby or Not! on iOS by "a suspicious burst of traffic on our itch.io pageall coming from Google organic search." Only after adding a "where did you find our game?" player poll to the page were the developers made aware of some popular TikTok videos featuring the iOS version."Luckily, some people in the [Tiktok] comments mentioned the real game nameDiapers, Please!so a few thousand players were able to google their way to our page," VoltekPlay writes. "I can only imagine how many more ended up on the thiefs App Store page instead."Earlier this week, the $2.99 iOS release of My Baby or Not! was quickly climbing iOS's paid games charts, attracting an estimated 20,000 downloads overall, according to Sensor Tower. Marwane Benyssef's only previous iOS release, Kiosk Food Night Shift, also appears to be a direct copy of an itch.io release. Marwane Benyssef's only previous iOS release, Kiosk Food Night Shift, also appears to be a direct copy of an itch.io release. The App Store listing credited My Baby or Not! to "Marwane Benyssef," a new iOS developer with no apparent history in the game development community. Benyssef's only other iOS game, Kiosk Food Night Shift, was released last August and appears to be a direct copy of Kiosk, a pay-what-you-want title that was posted to itch.io last year (with a subsequent "full" release on Steam this year)In a Reddit post, the team at VoltekPlay said that they had filed a DMCA copyright claim against My Baby or Not! Apple subsequently shared that claim with Bennysof, VoltekPlay writes, along with a message that "Apple encourages the parties to a dispute to work directly with one another to resolve the claim."This morning, Ars reached out to Apple to request a comment on the situation. While awaiting a response (which Apple has yet to provide), Apple appears to have removed Benyssef's developer page and all traces of their games from the iOS App Store.It could happen to youApple's App Store guidelines specifically tell developers not to "simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store or make some minor changes to another apps name or UI and pass it off as your own." But the "on the App Store" clause in that sentence seemingly prioritizes protection for games released in Apple's walled garden, and penalizes games released on the web using open standards like HTML5. Apple was slow to stem the tide of iOS App Store Wordle clones that copied the web-based original. Apple was slow to stem the tide of iOS App Store Wordle clones that copied the web-based original. We saw this difference take center stage in 2022 when the sudden success of web game Wordle led to dozens of iOS copycats that Apple took days to purge from the App Store listings. We've also seen legitimately original games removed from the App Store after copycats filed international copyrights for a title that the original developer didn't secure.Outside of iOS, GameStop's now-defunct NFT Marketplace hosted a series of unlicensed HTML5 games that had been copied wholesale from elsewhere on the web.Elsewhere in its Reddit discussion of the problem, VoltekPlay writes that its use of the Godot Engine for Diapers, Please! makes it "very easy to decompile a game and rebuild it for another platform" using open-source tools. Others in that same thread have encouraged other web game developers to make use of encryption and obfuscation tools to prevent similar code theft of their own projects.While it's unclear whether Benyssef will be allowed to retain any of the revenue derived from his now-removed iOS titles, it's clear that the original creators at VoltekPlay won't be profiting directly from this situation. "At this moment our team earned $0 and paid for a lawyer consultation," VoltekPlay writes on Reddit. "Lawyers told us that there is no chance to pursue the thief in the court..."Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming EditorKyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 7 Comments