TL; PhD
- The members of Innersloth said that Fortnite’s “Impostors” model is almost a direct copy among us.
- This includes not only gameplay, but also terminology, themes, and map design.
- There are no signs of an immediate lawsuit, and some people at Innersloth have offered to cooperate with other studios.
A new temporary “imposter” mode in Epic Games’ Fortnite is frustrating the developers among us, Innersloth, who see this as an uncreative copy of their own social interpretation game.
Like among us, Impostors let most players complete tasks, while a few infiltrators — Literally referred to as “imposter” in both titles — Try to kill or destroy them. The similarities extend to meetings, voting to sniff out suspects, and even quick chat menus that were not previously available in Fortnite. Victoria ChenInnersloth’s community director stated on Twitter that she doesn’t mind Epic copying the game mechanics, but the company should at least use “different topics or terminology.”
Just like game mechanics, these should not be locked, but at least even different topics or terminology will make things more interesting? 😕
programmer Gary Porter Accusing Epic of plagiarizing the most famous map among us, Skeld, simply flipped some elements to make it unique. Co-founder of Innersloth Marcus Bromander Echoing with Tran, Epic should “invest 10% more effort” to create a gameplay model.
Innersloth did not threaten to take legal action, but people like Tran and another colleague, Kalum Underwood, Has proposed to cooperate with studios that are considering adopting similar gameplay.
In any case, it is not clear whether the lawsuit has a chance to proceed in court. Epic has hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for defense, and “Among Us” itself is modeled after other social reasoning games, such as Mafia/Werewolf dating back to 1986.
What do you think of this whole situation? Is it fair to copy the game to this level, or is Epic out of fashion?