Does anyone remember when that awful mobile developer cloned Venba but replaced its mouth-watering South Indian food with… peanut butter and jelly? How about when Peak’s developers encouraged players to turn to piracy rather than playing a Roblox ripoff of the game? Or even when Hoyoverse allegedly stole an indie dev’s minigame in Zenless Zone Zero?
Stolen concepts are everywhere, especially on mobile app stores and Roblox, but they’re often able to evade takedowns by using new assets, names, or tweaking the formula juuuuust a little bit (or apparently, in the case of that last example, being made by Hoyoverse). However, recently on the Google Play store, the developers behind these clones seem to be getting a lot bolder.
Over the past month, Reddit users perusing the Android app store have reported running into shameless knock-offs of some of 2026’s biggest games, including Subnautica 2, Tomodachi Life, and Paralives. It’s especially surprising how many Tomodachi Life rip-offs were allowed to sit around the store despite Nintendo’s vehemently litigious tendencies.
In the case of these Switch game clones, DMCA copyright takedowns are seemingly avoided in part by using slightly misspelled or abbreviated names like tomo life or Tomodochi: Live The Dream Life. The other knockoffs, however, are bolder and steal their source material’s title word for word (or tack a few words onto the end, in the case of the blandly titled Subnautica 2 – Underwater Game).
A lot of these clones’ store pages even incorporate AI-generated assets, but a few, like this Paralives clone, have seemingly straight-up ripped the assets directly from their source material:
What’s extra weird is how these games seem to pose as other apps through their Google Play links. The link to the Paralives clone seems to advertise itself as something akin to a low-effort Roblox game with keywords like “obby” and whatever “memerot” is. A Subnautica 2 ripoff’s link poses as “Hellmart Simulator,” apparently a reference to the indie horror game Hellmart that’s spawned quite a few Google Play ripoffs of its own. A Tomodachi Life clone’s URL even contains the term “TransitPilot” in its link (and, according to its reviewers, has somehow redirected some users to a transportation app with the same name).
According to Reddit users who have given these clones a spin, a lot of them are full of ads, which isn’t really a surprise. Others redirect to entirely different apps. Quite a few of them offer expensive in-app purchases. All of them, though, are bad. One Reddit user shared a screenshot of the Paralives ripoff, which boasts… a faceless yellow character, a disturbingly large baby, and a Polish ad for a toy washing machine:
Google Play’s moderation team is apparently delisting as many of these clones as it can find. (Just while writing this story, I saw a few get taken offline.) But the damage has already been done: GameRant reported that two separate Tomodachi Life clones received 50,000 downloads each before being removed. Despite the real Paralives devs telling players there will never be a mobile version, its mobile clone hit 10,000 downloads, and most of the other clones I’ve seen have at least a few thousand.
Obviously, reviewers who were fooled by these clones are pretty pissed off. One review on a ripoff reads: “IT ISN’T TOMODACHI LIFE!!!!!”
If you’re a Kotaku reader, it’s probably hard to fathom falling for one of these clones. But, eager commenters, I urge you to think about who you were when you were a wide-eyed eight-year-old. I was a pretty tech-literate kid, but if someone told me I could make a Mii on my tablet without needing to own a console, I would absolutely have fallen for it!
