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Plagiarism?

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VI Imre

VI Imre

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Oct 6, 2010
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Steam threw me a new game today, Evil Bank Manager. The colors and province borders immediately caught my attention, this game uses a copy-paste EU4 map. I don't own the game thus I can't tell much about the gameplay other than it is about bank if it wasn't obvious by reading the title. However one must wonder whether the devs made a deal with Paradox or they just plagiarized the map folder of EU4.
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Savoy caught my eye. It uses the flag EU4 uses. Do an image search of Savoyard flags on Google and none of them look like this. Paradox should definitely look into this game.

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Truewhit said:
The name itself is just cringeworthy. Evil Bank? What kind of name is that?
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The game appears to have been made by Russians, so I wonder if some kind of machine translation is at work or if they just aren't fully fluent in English. It wouldn't be a first time for a game on Steam.

Here's the description of the game on Steam:

"What could be better than having a million? Have a Billion? But this will not give you all power over the world. Your goal is not to make a lot of money - but to start printing them. Become a Federal Reserve System and you become greatest!"

durbal said:
That's the standard House of Savoy flag. It's all over the province of Piemonte (seat of the House of Savoy) in Italy still.

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1...-wiz-img.......0i30j0i5i30j0i8i30.pgsyiziIHGg

So I'm not sure what you're on about there.
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The F E R T letters are what make it different. It's on the flag in EU4 and in this game, but I don't see it anywhere on those House of Savoy flags when doing a google search.
 
Bouchart said:
The F E R T letters are what make it different. It's on the flag in EU4 and in this game, but I don't see it anywhere on those House of Savoy flags when doing a google search.
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It's on the flag for Savoy in the game? I never noticed it.

Seems weird since I don't know of any flag or coat of arms for the House of Savoy that has that motto on it.
 
durbal said:
It's on the flag for Savoy in the game? I never noticed it.

Seems weird since I don't know of any flag or coat of arms for the House of Savoy that has that motto on it.
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Yes Paradox changed Savoy's flag a couple of patches ago because it too closely resembled another flag and led to some confusion. It looks a lot like Denmark's flag I believe.

You can see it on the wiki here https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Savoy
 
It looks a bit like the map of HOI4.

Having said that, doing some kind of strategy game that is based around a map is bound to look similar to one of PI's games. PI made so many of these games and each has a different style for the maps. I wouldn't be surprised if the makers got their ideas from PI, but calling it plagiarism is quite a stretch.

They Savoyards put FERT on their flags to distinguish their flags from other flags which were too similar, see also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Savoy#Flag
 
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durbal said:
It's on the flag for Savoy in the game? I never noticed it.

Seems weird since I don't know of any flag or coat of arms for the House of Savoy that has that motto on it.
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It was changed to include FERT to not be confused with the Danish flag. Which is silly, as the cross is off centre for the Danish one.
Same reasoning which killed the Swedish crowns some years back when people were unable to distinguish French lillies from Swedish crowns.
 
luitzen said:
It looks a bit like the map of HOI4.

Having said that, doing some kind of strategy game that is based around a map is bound to look similar to one of PI's games. PI made so many of these games and each has a different style for the maps. I wouldn't be surprised if the makers got their ideas from PI, but calling it plagiarism is quite a stretch.

They Savoyards put FERT on their flags to distinguish their flags from other flags which were too similar, see also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Savoy#Flag
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No, it's the EU4 map with a few provinces removed. https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Lists_of_provinces
And the national colors are the same with the exception that Salzburg and Bavaria switched colors.
 
VI Imre said:
No, it's the EU4 map with a few provinces removed. https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Lists_of_provinces
And the national colors are the same with the exception that Salzburg and Bavaria switched colors.
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I was mostly referring to the look and feel of the map. The actual things on the map, the provinces, are really not similar to EUIV. For any game that will draw provinces within, let's say France, there will be some similarity and in this case it's really not a great similarity.
 
You can recognize the provinces instantly, simply because not a single EU game has ever made them accurate to scale or historical-looking (it always took mods to make them so). And the people who plagiarized it used the same inaccurate scale and weird borders.

They even left in that one Hungarian province I never conquer as Ottomans. Even the state borders are mostly same (Narbonne especially).

Definitely plagiarism if map borders are covered by laws.
 
I don't think it would be enough to constitute plagiarism in a legal sense. But thanks for your vigilance :) I'll see if our legal department has any opinions on this.
 
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