A game as popular as Studio MDHR’s animated run-and-gunner is bound to get its fair share of mobile rip-offs, but the bootleg version of Cuphead that showed up on the iTunes app store overnight was something else — a very rough, semi-playable version of the full game.
“Cuphead by StudioMDHR Entertainment Inc.” read the iTunes listing, which showed up in the store early this morning. It featured screenshots from the Xbox One and PC release, a description pulled directly from Steam, and even linked to a cloned version of the official support page.
It sure looked like there was a legitimate version of Cuphead for iOS, available for $US4.99 ($7).
As news of the release spread, the official Studio MDHR Twitter account denounced the listing as a scam. The tweet was issued at 9:25 AM. At 9:50 AM I attempted to purchase the game from iTunes.
I was able to bring up the listing, but my purchase transaction failed, with a message telling me “This app is no longer available.”
While the game is gone now, several iOS gamers made the purchase before its bootleg nature was made clear. What they got for their $US4.99 ($7) seems to be an un-optimised port of the actual game — same graphics, same cutscenes, same music — with an on-screen joystick and buttons. Vook64 grabbed a clip from the game’s opening and first platforming stage.
It’s really rough. The controls seem horrible, and the timing is almost certainly off. As Cuphead is a game that requires precise controls, calling this “playable” is being kind.
Youtuber Sevenape captured footage from the vegetable garden boss fight.
Hopefully folks who purchased this game will be able to secure refunds from Apple and no harm comes to their devices.
Comments
One response to “Bootleg Cuphead Port Quickly Pulled From ITunes”
Wow. That’s brazen.
If you make a game in Unity your source is pretty much open to anyone interested in looking at it. But to take that and actually get it running on another platform is impressively scummy.