The Chinese market is no stranger to brazen rip-offs of popular Western games, but even taking that into account this Overwatch clone is something else.
Spotted by ponpo and called Hero Mission, it’s a mobile shooter that is basically Overwatch, only for a phone, and with the slightest of design edits (most lifted from Overwatch, some stolen from other properties like Mad Max and Star Wars).
From the music to the menus to the level design, please enjoy:
In case you need to be sure just how close these character designs are to the originals, let’s take a better look at them:
Here’s Soldier 76 x Ana
In case you couldn’t tell from the purple, spider and prominent arse, this is Widowmaker.
Immortan Roadhog. He even has the hook.
Chinese D.Va
I had to check if this was just a cut + paste job of an existing Reinhardt skin.
I think this guy is Zarya? My confusion would easily make him the most original character in the game. UPDATE: Maybe it’s Orisa? UPDATE 2: Hah, turns out it’s Pharah!
Mercy’s clone is so lazy they didn’t even bother changing the face, hair or wings. Though they did manage to remove her pants.
If Hanzo spent his spare time arguing about PC hardware on Reddit.
If Genji was Sephiroth.
Winston is now a panda.
White Lucio’s music tastes look Eurotrashy
And finally, half-naked McCree
Just like Overwatch, there are a bunch of skins available. To the game’s credit, some of them look OK, incorporating unique designs that pay homage to famous Chinese characters/stories, or just look cool in their own right.
Others, though, are just more random pieces of copyright infringement.
Execute Order 76
The Winston x Panda guy manages to borrow from both World of Warcraft and Kung Fu Panda on the same menu screen.
Meanwhile the Genji dude’s skins feature both Assassin’s Creed and Rambo cameos.
Given Overwatch’s popularity, this isn’t the first time a Chinese studio has done this, and it likely won’t be the last either, despite Blizzard’s game having a massive and official release in the Chinese market.
If you want to have a closer look at the official source, the game’s site is here.
Comments
17 responses to “Chinese Overwatch Clone Has Some Giant Balls”
Imma call it Underwatch.
I will call it JianGong (监工)!
Sephiroth!
萨菲罗斯
*hums one-winged angel theme*
I think Im okay with a Panda Winston.
God I love this stuff.
Never change China….well, maybe a little bit.
Shame china never makes anything new themselves so the west can steal from them in return.
The difference being that China’s copyright laws are so blatantly biased in favour of Chinese companies pulling this shit on overseas companies despite treaty agreements to the contrary, whereas US copyright law is rather indiscriminate, meaning if a US company pulled something like this on a Chinese company, they could probably be taken to court for it and the law would be on the side of the Chinese company.
Rubbish.
US-based companies, such as Zynga, have made an art form out of successfully blatantly ripping off competitor’s products.
US law is only for those with larger legal departments than game departments and is heavily biased towards US plaintiffs.
US juries have a curious tendency to favour US companies over foreign (particularly Chinese) ones (compare the results in foreign courts with US ones, for example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electronics_Co. ).
The US protects its companies with a huge range of intellectual property protections not available in the vast majority of jurisdictions elsewhere in the world, such as software patents. And it’s no coincidence that the US is host to an enormous patent trolling industry.
The US is no saint when it comes to intellectual property, and is far from colour blind about how it selectively enforces intellectual property rights.
Apparently, back in the day (way back), the US had a habit of printing European books in their newspapers. When Dickens and other authors objected, the American media and people told them to get lost. The Americans figured that with America being a new country it made sense to use the knowledge of people from elsewhere to fill the gaps caused by a lack of infrastructure. This only changed a few generations later, when Americans started producing more original content than they exported and pushed their government to institute IP laws protecting their goods.
You can see this same pattern almost universally. Poorer countries always have less incentive to protect IP because their population is too busy just surviving. It takes investments to create original content, both time and money. And, like America, as these countries get richer they tend to get stronger IP laws (or at least better enforce their current ones).
No doubt China is in this basket at the moment. It’ll likely take some time before it reaches the point where these things stop appearing in the news but I hope journos take these things into account when writing stories. Just to minimize the amount of stereotyping and assumptions going around out there.
The difference being, of course, that China has not only made numerous treaty commitments to avoid just this sort of thing, but is also the world’s 2nd largest economy rather than some rural backwater nation, actively promotes such actions through their security laws forcing foreign companies to enable state access to data that they are compelled to store in-country, and uses sovereign immunity laws to enable their multitude of state backed companies to avoid being sued for violations in other nations.
You know, just to bring some perspective to that minimisation you are attempting to promote…
The perceived issue with China isn’t legal, it’s cultural. It’s been a feature of east Asian cultures for centuries that iterative progress and building on the work of those who came before is the norm. It used to be the norm in western cultures as well, and things like apprenticeships still exist from that time.
The notion that designs can be exclusively owned was as foreign to Asian cultures as the idea of property ownership was to many native cultures. In China, if someone takes your design and improves on it not only is it a sign of respect that your design was worthy of being used as a benchmark, but the design is ultimately improved upon and society benefited as a result. If you wanted to be the best at making something, that thing had to actually be the best, not a mediocre product that the law prevented anyone else from improving.
Neither the western nor eastern approaches are right or wrong, they’re just different.
Yeah but this shameless, terrible copy of Overwatch doesn’t really fall under that umbrella, does it 😉
I don’t know, that Immortan Joe Roadhog skin looks pretty awesome.
It’s the 2nd largest economy but it has such a large population that in practice it’s still relatively poor. And it has put laws in place but as I said until lately they haven’t had much incentive to enforce them. Lately, I believe they have been trying more. And if they’re violating copy protection internationally then the IP laws in those markets need to be strengthened. It’s not like China is the only country with an absurd number of state-owned enterprises.
In economic matters, countries tend to look out for their own to the exclusion of all others. It’s not just China.
Now Blizzard just needs release these as skins!
im just sad that there isnt a mad max skin for roadhog or junkrat. the roadhog one in this game is perfect for overwatch.
Overwatch, but Mercy isn’t wearing pants? GOTY!
As a Chinese. I’ve checked the official website of this game and found out that the “Lucio” you guys thought is actually Tracer according to the description on the website. The real Lucio is the “D.VA” girl you guys thought. Amazing?