Asiasoft’s new English mobile game rips off Blizzard IP

There’s no denying Asiasoft has been a giant in the online free-to-play arena, but its choices for its English language mobile offerings have been surprising, to say the least.

Asiasoft’s first English language mobile game was Minox, a pet battle game that looked like an unwanted stepchild when put next to its cousin Ragnarok Mobile TH. Given that Minox was such a poor, low quality choice for a regional publisher of Asiasoft’s repute, I’ve been expecting the company to up its mobile game with its next app.

For The Tribe is the regional publisher’s second English language mobile game, and is a 3D hero defense slash card battle game with 2.5D backgrounds. There is a solid story in For The Tribe, and the narrative is closely tied with how the game’s features emerge. Players are expected to rally their own army of legendary heroes from the Human, Orc, Elven, and Dwarven tribes in the world of Kalima in order to fight off the encroaching dark forces. As with most combat-centric games, there are both PvP and PvE modes.

Visually, For The Tribe is quite a treat. Bar the slightly awkward running animations of its hero models, it’s a well-designed game with a functional UI. It has all the features of your standard card battle game, with players being able to summon assistance through friends and upgrade their cards with common ones. What I do take issue with is how the game seems to make use of Warcraft intellectual property.

(See: Hands-on with Hearthstone‘s infamous Chinese clone)

While changing Medivh to Medivin and the Burning Legion to the Hell Legion is more effort than publishing a game that literally translates to Dota Hero, For The Tribe still has a character model that looks and behaves the same way the Warcraft III demon hunter does, and this is pretty disrespectful. Asiasoft distributes box sets of Blizzard Entertainment games in Southeast Asia, so it boggles the mind why it would want to promote misuse of its partner’s IP.

You mean Northrend, right?

To be fair, Asiasoft’s strategy according to its press release is simply to “provide quality content to the growing number of mobile users in Southeast Asia.” A game that mixes the popular card battle genre with equally popular hero defense gameplay is probably going to sit well with mobile gamers here. Besides, it’s rare that your ordinary consumer cares about what IP belongs to which company; they’re more interested in whether the game plays well or not.

By those standards, Asiasoft has a great game to add to its mobile portfolio. It’s the fact that a regional publisher is apparently saying yes to misuse of IP that doesn’t sit well with me.

For The Tribe is available on both iOS and Android. Asiasoft also declined to comment for this story.

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