Earlier this year Tyson Bulter-Boschma, a game developer based in Melbourne, Australia, released an impressive free demo on itch.io showing off what an open-world Superman video game could look like. His YouTube video (below) went viral, with over 3.7 million views.
The Creative Director/Founder of Toybox Games Studios, Tyson has taken to Twitter (under his account @TJATOMICA) accusing Hero Game Studios of stealing his Superman demo and uploading it to Steam where they are charging people to download the demo, when he released the game on itch.io for free earlier in the year.
Bulter-Boschma wrote, “Someone has put my Superman demo up and Steam and is selling it as a full price game! I made this for fun to show what could be made! This is a scam! The demo is free on Itch! Please retweet and report this crap!”
Someone has put my Superman demo up and steam and is selling it as a full price game!!!
I made this for fun to show what could be made!This is a scam! The demo is free on Itch!
Please retweet and report this crap! @DCComics @valvesoftware https://t.co/IpuC6qceo3— Tyson Butler-Boschma (@TJATOMICA) November 2, 2022
Hero Game Studios, who are charging people to download the same demo, have claimed that Tyson is an ex-employee who stole the game from them:
“Our game is not stolen. One of the former developers of our user team TJ ATOMICA left our team a long time ago, but now he claims that the entire project belongs to him. But this is completely false. The game’s rights and development process belong entirely to us. The reason why he did this is because the sales were increasing quite rapidly. He thinks he can make money from it.”
Who should be believed? It should be noted, while this isn’t exactly a Superman game, neither Tyson Bulter-Boschma nor Hero Game Studios owns the rights to Superman, so the debate over legal ownership of the demo will rage on.
TJATOMICA is to be believed. Full stop. Because it IS the matrix demo (I played it in Matrix form on the PS5, it’s free.). It was released as a tech demo of what the new Unreal Engine can do. The fact that they’re trying to sell the “game” at all tells you everything you need to know. They took a tech-demo with a Superman-themed character skin and are charging for it. Which is, at best, unethical and at worst, illegal on several levels. TJ released it 6 months ago. And TJ/Toybox Games Studios didn’t “develop it” either. It was Epic Games. All TJ… Read more »