Regarding “#Werewords”, we are getting asked if we licensed Insider to Bezier Games. We did not. — Oink Games (@oinkgms) 2017年6月12日

We just let each of you decide whether a game is copied or not. We all know that the rules of a game are not protected by any copyright. All we can say is that we didn’t agree to the offer from Bezier Games. The offer that they wanted to “add more special roles”, “integrate it with an app”…

https://opinionatedgamers.com/2017/06/15/werewords-and-oink/



Acknowledging there is an existing game with some similarity and releasing the game anyway, because one could not receive an “OK” from the other party: We don’t agree with such a way of publishing. Especially when a much stronger publisher releases the later game.



If this kind of publishing continues, people who don’t have many distribution channels would have difficulty benefiting from their games. This applies to small companies like ours and/or to individual game designers.



We have talked with many publishers. This is not the first time we couldn’t reach an agreement. Nearly all the publishers we have talked to showed some respect to our games though. They never released anything that is remotely close to our games, even if we couldn’t reach an agreement. This is one of many wonderful things about the boardgaming world.



This is also one of the reasons why there are so many game designers who distribute their own games globally. We didn’t imagine that some would think : “Since we had the same idea before knowing the existing game, we’ll develop it even further and release it!” and then publish a game.



We now know, this can happen. It can happen right after you released a new game and can be done by a large publisher. Having that in mind, we’ll keep trying to develop unique and great games and act in a way that we can survive.