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An e-mail sent out by Elyland, the developers behind Draconius GO, indicates that Niantic is not pleased that Draconius exists. The developers are claiming to have received an “un-grounded” complaint on the App store from Niantic.

Allegedly, Niantic has stated that the existence of Draconius GO is a copyright violation of Pokémon GO. In response to the complaint, the devs shared the following response in an e-mail sent out to media and friends:

“We’ve received an un-grounded complaint from Niantic in the Appstore — they think we’ve violated their copyright. However, we didn’t use their coding or graphics when developing our product, it’s absolutely original. The developers of this popular GO game seem to think that they own the exclusive rights for the whole AR genre. It’s not like that. We believe that the market and players will only benefit from healthy competition.

When we developed this game, we consulted leading world-class lawyers, and we are 100% certain that Niantic’s claim is unjustified. Niantic’s reaction shows that they consider us as a serious rival. By doing so, they actually prove that our product is better. In just one year, our Ukrainian team has managed to do more than Niantic, with all their billions of income. And we are proud of our results. Our graphic is unique and better quality than in any other AR games. Besides, our game offers a variety of game mechanics that were never used in other AR games.

We hear and understand our players, we offer them an interesting gameplay. That’s what makes us special. We hope that our rivals will start improving their own games instead of making complaints and ignoring their fans. Currently, we are preparing new updates that we hope will make our players happy in the nearest future.”

The devs have shared no further info, but it doesn’t seem that this story will end anytime soon. Draconius is getting more and more popular, growing to almost 100 000 downloads on Android over the past seven days.

Admittedly, the game is very very similar to Pokémon GO, but it’s rise in popularity is not surprising — especially in rural areas. Unlike Pokémon GO, Draconius doesn’t rely on the existence of actual real world Points of Interest.

Draconius Go is a game developed by Elyland, an Ukrainian development studio, and is available in the Apple iOS and Google Play app stores.