Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to make games — to design immersive worlds for others to explore. Like everyone else in my generation, this dawned on me while playing Ocarina of Time.

When I was seven years old, I saw an ad for a well-regarded game school in Nintendo Power magazine. Fast forward a decade. I leave my hometown in Anchorage, Alaska for Redmond, Washington — a sleepy bedroom community east of Seattle which doubles as an international hotspot for game development and home to the same game school in that ad.

Three months after that, I’m sitting in math class questioning the entire premise of my life. What have I done?

What I expected to be the first day of the rest of my life turned into a trip down a rabbit hole of washed out game industry professors waxing poetic to tired lecture halls. They informed everyone to hang up their grandiose dreams of game design and to resign themselves to coding in a cubicle like they had done, developing the latest film tie-in game for the GameBoy Color.

I dropped out at the end of the year.

I knew there was a better way to develop games. The way Nintendo Power promised me at such a tender age. A way involving monetary and creative success over disillusioned burnouts and the dogma of corporate game development.

Then Flappy Bird came out.

I downloaded it — a moment I later realized runs bizarrely parallel to my time spent playing Zelda. It’s success both inspired and mocked me. And I soon realized that the App Store was the answer.

I knew I could easily churn out the kind of crap that ends up on the top charts. Creating games on par with the land of Hyrule would have to wait. I set my sights decidedly lower.

So I started an iOS game company. Palette L.L.C. was born. I could control my own destiny and inspire a sense of fun in others through games!

After about a year, I was competent in putting together simple, fun, crappy games from the comfort of my apartment. Games involving jumping and balls and sometimes cute cats — all culminating into Rotable, a game that can be effectively described as Pong in a circle. It was my piece de resistance.

Though it was addicting and pretty fun to play, echoes of my professors’ voices ran through my head. Was this no better than making the GameBoy Color games they had resigned themselves to?

Existential crisis aside, I realized I had a bigger problem: Promotion.

Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, I realized that just simply submitting an app onto the App Store results in exactly no one playing it. You know all of those indie overnight successes? Behind each one is a shitload of marketing money and glad-handing.

So I set out to find a publisher. A company with resources that could take my games about jumping and balls and cats to the top of the charts for all good people to play. Someone with no scruples or moral resolve.

Someone like Ketchapp.

Out of all the crap machines on the App Store, Ketchapp— a prominent iOS game developer and publisher — is truly the most well-oiled.

While obsessively observing the top charts, I realized that these guys had truly mastered the art of churning out crap. It seemed like every two weeks there was another craptastic, chart-topping hit from them. Titles like Amazing Brick, Amazing Thief, Don’t Touch the Spikes!, and last year’s notorious hit, 2048 — the crappy Threes clone everybody got upset about.

I knew these were the guys who were gonna take Rotable to the top. So I did some reconnaissance and searched them on LinkedIn.

Ketchapp is Michel and Antoine Morcos, two French brothers who are also French business partners. I began fantasizing about their lifestyle through the lens of American stereotype, Michel eating an expensive baguette while Antoine is thinking up their latest crappy game.

Their website invites developers to submit games for their consideration, so, in good faith, I emailed my game right to them. (I had actually submitted a game about cats to them before, so they had already heard of me.)

Rotable was now sitting in their inbox. But after a couple days, there was no response.

I made it my goal to contact them in every way possible until I knew that they had played my game. I sent countless messages to their business emails. I tweeted. I Facebooked. Still no response, just persistent communication across every platform.

Finally, Antoine got back to me on, of all places, Twitter.

“The style is minimal and nice,” said Antoine via DM. “But we still are not totally convinced with the gameplay.”

Similarly, Michel responded on Facebook.

“Okay, I played it,” Michel finally admitted. “But Antoine told me he didn’t like it. That’s why we didn’t get back to you, sorry!”

Then, I guess for good measure, they replied to one of the one-sided email conversations I had been having with myself.

“Sorry for the delays,” Antoine said. “We checked your game. It is indeed [in line with] Ketchapp[‘s] minimal style, but I am not sure the game is enough fun.”

Well, at least there were cordial and had the decency to respond. My rejection had now officially spawned across multiple platforms. So I bit my lip, thanked them for their time, and let it go.

I quickly moved on to make other games no one has ever played, excited to be building a relationship with such a renowned publisher and anxious to submit another title to them again. Surely I was on the right path!

But then they fucking stole my game.

They didn’t even steal it a little bit. They stole it a lot. Everything from the concept to the design to the mediocre gameplay. The only thing that they changed was the control scheme — which they made far shittier than mine. Maybe that was the Ketchapp fun I was missing!

I submitted Rotable to them back in late-October. And by early December, Circle Pong! had mysteriously found its way onto the top of the App Store charts without my approval or an agreement with the only publisher I submitted to (Ketchapp) in place.

Circle Pong! is a game released by a company called App Cow. It peaked at Number 12 on the Top Free App Store charts in the United States.

iTunes says the app itself dates back to early October, a few weeks before I submitted Rotable. The assholes overwrote an existing app they had cataloged in order to spoof the date.

This is reinforced by the fact that Circle Pong! was updated on November 19th and did not hit the charts until December 7th, well after my October 29th submission date. Before November 19th, it was likely a completely different app.

Apple allows the name and contents of an app to be changed entirely with each update.

The damming evidence that confirms App Cow to be a shell company for Ketchapp is in the game’s assets.

Circle Pong!’s menu has nearly identical iconography to existing Ketchapp titles like their other game Circle. Also, the failure sound effect used in Circle Pong! is the same as in Don’t Touch the Spikes!

To top it off and get even weirder, there is an entity named Obile Glob that republishes Ketchapp titles to the Amazon App Store — Circle Pong! sits in their library right alongside other Ketchapp titles like Stick Hero and 2 Cars.

After Circle Pong!’s release, numerous other clones have appeared on the App Store — including Circle Pong+, Circle Pong 2, Circle Pong HD, etc.

There is no doubt that Ketchapp stole Rotable.

The real issue is that they can get away with it.

Ketchapp is an established publisher with monetary resources and apparent pull on the App Store. Many of their games achieve a top ranking on the charts and are featured by Apple.

They also promote themselves as a publisher, actively soliciting submissions from game developers via their website. Like myself, the people who will submit have a viable product but likely no resources to promote it — otherwise they wouldn’t be seeking a publisher in the first place.

It’s easy for them to reject games that developers have submitted — only to steal, publish, and profit from them anyway.

What am I and other developers in the same situation going to do when the same lack of resources that drove me to submit my game to them render me unable to take any sort of meaningful action against them? They would laugh at the threat of legal action as another one of their craptastic stolen hits climbs the charts!

I’m the goddamn Tesla of crappy apps and they are Edison. How many more Teslas are there that haven’t come forward? How long will Ketchapp and similar unscrupulous publishers continue to get away with this shit?

I’m upset.

I’m upset that Nintendo Power ran that game school ad. I’m upset that my professors told me to give up. And I’m upset that two French brothers can sit around eating baguettes while stealing games from independent developers with no viable resources.

Above all, I’m upset that a market like this is able to flourish and thrive. With its current structure that favors top rankings and editorial features as means of discovery, the App Store does not reward ideas or even execution of those ideas. It rewards those with resources with more resources. Laissez-faire!

Browse the top charts in the App Store and you’ll come to realize a very disappointing fact. We live in an era where having a supercomputer in your pocket is not only common, but expected — and on them we are playing Jelly Jump.

As it stands, the top charts are a race to the bottom. When we stop rewarding those who make the games and start rewarding publishers with established resources, we lock ourselves into an echo chamber of the same tired ideas being shouted at the top of everyone’s lungs.

However, it is not in Apple’s interest to try to make the App Store somehow ‘fair’. Nor is it in the interest of the developers who make Apple money. Marketplaces are meant to be exploited, and the App Store is no different.

And as the Morcos brothers must have done in the beginnings of their career, I am plotting against those who have more resources than me until I become someone with resources. I am no better than them.

I still dream of my games about balls and cats to be at the top of the charts. I still want to one day create immersive worlds like those I explored as a kid. And I want to empower a generation of independent game developers to do the same without falling victim to the same petty thievery I have.

This isn’t a sob story.

This is a call to arms for all those who share my dream of turning independent game development into a a sustainable business. In a time when anyone can publish their own games, it’s no longer enough to be a developer — we must become capitalists.

The answer to exploitation isn’t fairness. It’s education — learning how to run an effective business and not make naive mistakes like I have.

Though Ketchapp may not make the best games (or, incidentally, no games at all), Michel and Antoine clearly run a cutthroat business. And while Ketchapp’s crap machine may be a profitable venture in the short term, history has showed us that markets are sustained by constant disruption, innovation, and distribution — not tired repetition.

The App Store presents an opportunity not only to make better games, but to do better business.

I refuse to give in to what my professors told me. I refuse to be discouraged because two French guys stole my game. And the only way we can stop being exploited and realize our dreams is to stand together and become better.

My game was stolen. But I see it as an opportunity, not a setback.