Tyson Butler-Boschma released the weekend project for free on Itch, but scammers are now claiming it's their game
An Australian made tech demo showcasing a Superman style gameplay in Unreal Engine 5 has been allegedly stolen by scammers who have released it on Steam.
Heroes City Superman Edition appears to be a direct copy of the free project Tyson Butler-Boschma who posted to Itch.io earlier this year which went viral on Reddit and Twitter at the time.
"I woke up and I had more notifications than I'm used to seeing on my humble little Twitter page and I'm like 'oh that's kind of interesting' maybe someone retweeted it and I'm just going to get like 100 likes or something," said Butler-Boschma.
"People were like this game is being sold up on Steam, I realised that someone had taken my build and had put it up on Steam and was selling it for like $40 Australian dollars."
The game which was built using some free assets, but was combined as a proof of concept by Butler-Boschma, and included a dynamic physics based cape which was hand designed.
"Now I didn't want to make any assumptions about it at first I was like 'Ok like you know I mean at the end of the day I put this thing together in a weekend' it's totally plausible that someone could have made a similar style demo, like that's fine."
"As I started to delve deep and investigate I realised that it was literally a one for one copy of the things that I'd developed."
Butler-Boschma said people were starting to think he was selling the game, something he purposely chose not to do as he didn't have the rights to the Superman character.
Heroes Game Studios the group behind this game have claimed that Butler-Boschma was an ex-developer on the project when questioned on the Steam forums and that he was just trying to cash in now the game was popular.
"I was also getting some pretty abusive messages because people were claiming that I was a scammer, and that I was trying to steal money from people and stuff and I was like I don't understand you know."
"Why would I put it up for free, and then keep it up for free if I was trying to scam people?"
At the time of reporting the game is still available on Steam, despite numerous reports from Butler-Boschma and others.
