A couple days ago, I made a post addressing Pixelberry/Series Entertainment's "It Lives Within." At the time, I wasn't aware of the story, I only knew that the name was the same. Since then, I saw many people accusing it of plagiarizing our game. I decided to look into it more, and after having watched all the episodes on YouTube, the claims of plagiarism unfortunately seem to be valid. As such, I'd like to further address this situation, and provide a list of stolen ideas and art with screenshot proofs and explanations.
A few years ago, I had a video call with one of the original writers for the It Lives Series. He no longer works for Pixelberry, and did not work with them at the time of the video call. Though I knew nothing about their original plans for the game before starting this project (including that they also intended to name the game "It Lives Within"), he told me their plans on that call. It was going to be a survivor-type cave crawl story with giant bug-inspired and creepy crawler monster enemies, where you play as a new character who is attacked by these creatures while camping and separated from their friends. From my understanding, Connor and his crew would be sort of like Sam and Dean from SPN, acting as these experienced "hunters" who help protect them.
That is not what the story of what Choices "It Lives Within" was. At all.
This means that the AI """writers""" at Series Entertainment/PB were not creating this story based on the original writers’ plans. They made their story idea later - after ILW was completed in its entirety. Therefore, it's reasonable to follow that unlike the title, these similarities are not coincidence. Though even then, the title It Lives Within had to do with the cave setting and going literally into the earth, while the AI version has nothing to do with caves. So the reasoning for the title is not the same as the reasoning for their original title.
With all this in mind, let’s go over the similarities between our game and the Choices It Lives Within AI show. I am going to be putting it beneath a read more, in case there are people who are interested in playing ILW and don’t want to get it spoiled.
Major things they stole:
Their villain, Silas, is Matthias. Literally, that's it. He's Matthias.
Silas is an immortal man who's been alive for almost 200 years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Matthias is an immortal man who's been alive 200+ years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Silas wants to sacrifice redfield Noah due to his connection to the Power as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to... I'm not quite sure what, exactly, as the story was a bit hard to follow. Matthias wants to sacrifice Rowan, due to their connection to the Power, as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to gain more power and freedom and heal the corrupted Power. Silas thinks he’s all manipulative and the main crew states that "He’s getting us to do his work for him!” Matthias thinks he's all manipulative, and gloats about being a "puppet master" and getting people to do his work for him.
And then there's his appearance. That's literally the same hairstyle - even has the part on the same side and the same curly swoops. He's the same age. Same race. Literally, just like Connor in their story is a recognizable AI-version of his in-game sprite, that's what Silas looks like to Matthias. All he's missing is the beard.
The gang's base of operations is Cora’s cabin
This one is interesting. It's such a tiny detail, and I'd grown so used to the cabin being their safe place that when Connor was like "We need to get back to the cabin" it literally took me a moment to realize - wait. They had nothing to do with that cabin in the original series. Using that as a home base was literally our idea, an It Lives Within original.
The main enemies are mind controlled townspeople working for Silas
Instead of following the precedent of the previous games and having the enemies be Power-twisted animal monsters, they decided to make their enemies humans that are mind-controlled into zombie-like beings with that attack the gang in hordes. This is a rip-off of It Lives Within's horrors, which are power-corrupted townsfolk that Matthias takes advantage of to oppose the main crew. And on top of that, they copied the carnival scene where Harper drives through a horde of horrors, including a scene where Devon drives through a horde of mind-controlled/zombified townsfolk.
Noah and Devon's relationship
Their relationship in this '"TV show" has suspicious similarities to their friendship/romance routes in ILW. They made Devon be redfield Noah's anchor to reality, and even had Devon use memories to help ground Noah, which we showed in the cabin scene where Devon and Noah play baseball together. And I know there were Noah x Devon shippers outside of me before ILW released, but it was never PB's plan to canonize them. So the fact that they are seemingly changing course to canonize them after they grew so popular in the fan version feels a bit too coincidental.
Scraping fan art for their AI animation frames
But what's even more egregious is that they have even stooped to scraping from fan artists, who have nowhere near the same following or exposure as our project does. Seriously, what are the odds that the MC they choose to use matches this artist's MC's race, gender, hair, and outfit exactly, that they used Noah's old outfit, that they are literally positioned on the same sides of the image? It's blatant plagiarism, and it's despicable. @errajay I'm so sorry they did this.
These are the biggest similarities, but considering that it was only like 15 minutes of content, that means that a high percentage of the story was stolen. Sure, the exact details of "Silas's" plan are different (he's like a horcrux for the "entity" aka power and he was split into 43 parts and Noah's one of his parts and he needs to kill him to get it back and be free or something) it's the same concept: immortal man who's trapped making a complicated ritual requiring sacrifice while manipulating people to get everything into place.
If you want to see for yourselves, please find it on YouTube. Do not support them with clicks or traffic on their app. Thank you! Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, no AI was used in the drafting of this post 💖
wait WHAT have they literally ripped off your entire game - characters and everything?!?!
It's hard to know exactly.
I know that the title they planned for It Lives 3 was actually It Lives Within before we announced our game.
However, the villain looks a lot like beta AI Matthias, and he apparently mind controls a ton of people to walk into a lake or something? So... who knows? Thankfully we don't have AI Abel, Linc, or Lia though.
Even if they were planning to name it It Lives Within, though, they knew about our game, and they knew how popular. If they searched It Lives Within, it would come up with our game. So either way it's in poor taste imo.
Voltage is apparently going after Lovestruck fan projects and taking them down, now that they are releasing their old content on Steam, so hopefully PB doesn't follow suit.
I wouldn’t worry. Firstly, we have this in writing about ILW:
Secondly, ILW is an original story. The Lovestruck fan games are recreations of the originals that people could technically play for free instead of playing the steam games, so it could take revenue from the company.
It’s kind of disappointing to me that to this day there is no actual alternative to Choices that doesn’t use AI. I know Candlelight Games’ love & magic was a popular game because it was coming from previous Pixelberry writers, but I feel like there are also signs of AI useage in their game as well.
Unfortunately, it seems like AI is becoming particularly present in the games industry. The place you're most likely to find non-AI games is probably in the Indie games space, but even then a lot of people in that space will probably use AI to get cheaper assets. People used to have to find free assets packs or pay for asset art in VNs, if they couldn't produce it on their own, but I can guess that a lot of people these days will use AI for it :/
I also know that all the owners/shareholders of basically any company have AI requirements for their businesses to make sure people are "keeping up with technology"
It sucks, but it just makes it all the more important to seek out true human creators and support them!!
will the rewrites focus mostly on plot level stuff and adding the new features? will their be any rewrites involving the LIs?
It's basically anything that I wanted to edit to improve the story. A "director's cut" of sorts. Some of it is cutting down scenes that were too long and stream lining pacing, some of it is adding new scenes, some of it is editing current scenes, some is adjusting lore/plot points to improve clarity and reduce confusion, some of it are small consistency edits, some is just line level edits, some is adapting dialogue to be more in character... it's anything, really.
Each LI does have some additional content though, however their romance arcs and scenes are remaining mostly the same. Some of the bigger edits regarding LIs are probably with the personality variants, as I've really committed to doing a lot of changes based on personality.
One of the bigger changes regarding LIs is probably that Lincoln returns to join the group a bit earlier than in legacy, since he showed up in ch 2 and then didn't come back until the middle/end of ch 5, so he was a quite absent in early chapters.
Hello, everyone! Sorry for the last minute getting this set up. But I'm finally ready to post our It Lives book club info 💕 👻
Reading Schedule:
We will start Saturday, September 6
We'll be reading four chapters a week.
It Lives Beneath will follow the same format and begin on October 4.
It Lives Within will also follow the same format and begin on November 1.
Essentially: We'll read ILITW in September, ILB in October, ILW in November.
How it works:
Each Saturday, I'll post a few discussion questions and polls for each chapter. Feel free to vote, reblog, and otherwise interact with the questions!
I will be making a book club channel in the It Lives Within discord for people to chat and discuss in a more relaxed, unstructured environment. Feel free to join and chat with us!
You can also make your own discussion posts and tag them #it lives book club . I'll go through the tags weekly and reblog anything I see in the tag.
In addition to the book club, I'll attempt to stream the week's chapters on Friday through Saturday. We will see how it goes. I'm a little nervous to read everything out loud! But I will make a separate post regarding streaming 😊
Look forward to enjoying spooky season alongside you all!
