When Abhi Swaminathan opened up a mobile cooking game called Sofra, his first reaction was to be amused.
He thought it looked extremely similar to his own narrative cooking game, Venba — with a few critical changes.
“The assets I saw in the game were pretty one-to-one. They were lifted, and in my eyes, they were kind of sanitized,” he said.
Swaminathan, founder and director of Toronto-based Visai Games, put out Venba in 2023.
In his game, players take on the role of an Indian mother who immigrates to Canada in the 1980s. Her recipe book is damaged, and as players re-create Tamil meals, they learn about the family at the centre of the game.
“The story is about love, family and loss,” Swaminathan said.
Sofra, meanwhile, is a cooking simulation game that came out this year that removes any narrative elements, instead letting users make dishes like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or pancakes.
In late June, Visai Games fired off a social media post accusing Sofra of being a “rip-off” that excised themes like “dealing with racism” — leading to comments from frustrated Venba fans and posts on video game blogs pointing out the similar aesthetics of the two games.
Swaminathan ultimately decided not to take any legal action, citing the frequency with which video game elements are taken by other creators, and the challenge of pursuing the companies responsible for Sofra, which are based in Europe.
“It’s simply not worth it for us,” he said.
Across the Atlantic, Moldova-based Alex Baboglo denies that his team did anything wrong when they put out Sofra.
Baboglo is CEO of the companies that put out the game, Global Advertising Network Ltd. and WorkPoint.
He said that Sofra was created by three teenagers as part of an in-house game development program, and that while the trio “took inspiration” from other games, everything in their product “was created by our internal designers from scratch.”
Lawyer Jay Kerr-Wilson, who heads up the copyright practice group at law firm Fasken, told CBC Toronto that copying the “look and feel” of a video game is not legally protected.
“Where you could cross the line is if you copy specific creative elements from a game,” he said.
