You can take this another direction as well: Sometimes two binaries for the same game with only a minor change can be so different as to prevent simple patching.
Until recently, a game I played was requiring a complete download of the entire game binary every time they made even the slightest change. This was because of how their game engine compiled everything together. There was no “patch this small change” possibility because any small change would cause radical changes to the entire structure of the download.
To me this means that if some game engines do this naturally, anyone who is stealing an existing game and posting it again can easily bypass any check of uploaded binaries.
The app copying gets even more complicated when you start thinking about non-custom art. If I purchase a pre-made UI on the Asset Store, how do I prove another app is ripping me off instead of just using that same pre-made UI? What if I’m using various script packages as well? I’m sure it’s possible to prove the theft, but it gets that much harder and that much more costly.
From the perspective of whatever marketplace the apps are going up on, even trying to compare the clones and the copies to see what are valid and what cross the line into outright theft is probably not cost effective. Considering how little money most apps make (basically $0), for a marketplace to have an employee spend even 10 minutes looking at every app means most apps posted cost the marketplace more money than they will ever earn.
Even paying a programmer to somehow develop analysis software that can tell when one app rips off another isn’t necessarily a cost effective solution. You’d also end up paying someone else to sort through potential false positives, then paying someone to deal with whatever steps the marketplace wants to take, and then dealing with appeals to the process.
YouTube and Twitch have it easy with looking for music because they’re just pattern matching, yet look at how many false positives both of those services have gone through.
Ultimately, I think we need a better system than we have now, I just do not believe we’re going to get it as long as the basic app price is $0 and the common end user just doesn’t care. There are currently court cases in the U.S. which are debating what exactly “cloning” entails or allows under copyright law, and that may ultimately be what forces the various marketplaces to start paying more attention to the garbage that is being posted.
Or they could go back to charging a posting fee for every app and using that money to pay for a real review process. I think a lot of independent developers will be opposed to that though.
