If you’re looking to play a game on your Mac about a homicidal, anthropomorphic rabbit on a quest for vengeance (and hey, who doesn’t), Lugaru HD by Wolfire Games has been the only option around since 2005. That changed a couple of weeks ago, though, when another developer started offering an identical game called Lugaru on the Mac App Store for $1.99… only a fifth of the price of the original game.
What’s happened? Well, some months back, Wolfire Games sweetened the pot of the Humble Indie Bundle (which they are also behind) by making Lugaru HD open source. They released the source under a GPL license, but as is common in these sorts of situations, they retained the rights to the game’s assets: graphics, sounds, levels, etc.
Unfortunately, it appears some less-than-scrupulous devs decided to take the source code and the assets and fling them up on the recently launched Mac App Store. Infuriatingly, they say they’re in the right.
“While we do understand [Wolfire’s] regrets, this does not change the fact that we have every legal right to market and sell the software, and we feel that $1.99 is a fair price,” Alex Matlin of development team iCoder told Kotaku.
Not true, as I’m sure they’re about to find out. Apple is currently investigating the charges.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
