Amidst allegations of cloning, Papa Quash is no longer on Apple's App Store.
Papa Quash had an uncomfortable similarity to indie gaming darling Johann Sebastian Joust from developer Die Gute Fabrik, and the resulting criticism has prompted Papa Quash to disappear.
Die Gute Fabrik addressed the issue in a lengthy blog post last night, but never called out Papa Quash specifically.
The company said it never gave permission for developer Ustwo to make a Johann Sebastian Joust-style game, which Ustwo originally claimed. In the same vein, Die Gute Fabrik pushed back against the notion of copyrighting mechanics, and cautioned people from drawing too many lines.
“We believe that it’s more productive to focus on making the best games possible, and giving them the unique ‘feel’ that only we can provide,” said the company in a statement. “That said, we do hope the community will continue to push back against cloning as a general development practice.”
The studio said negotiations about Johann Sebastian Joust are ongoing, and several publishers are interested in bringing the Move-driven motion control party game to a larger audience. There’s no real news to report on that front, however. Die Gute Fabrik is also prototyping their own iOS version, but, again, nothing concrete there, either.
“We also hope to develop a smart phone version of J.S. Joust in the future,” said the developer. “We’ve already discussed some ideas about how we’d tailor the game to such a platform.”
There has been no mention of the change to Papa Quash’s availability on the game’s Facebook or Twitter pages, but if you do a search for the game on the App Store, nothing comes up--poof.