This Game Sure Looks A Lot Like Venba

Food is core to what makes Venba, a cooking game from Visai Games, itself. Its thoughtful cooking mechanics are an extension of its story about a Canadian Indian family. Recipes, pulled from an oil-stained cookbook, are a way to explore both the beauty of Tamil culture and the struggle of immigrant families. It’s a triumph of game development, and you don’t just have to take my word for it; Venba won best debut and a social impact award at the 2024 Game Developers Choice Awards, the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival, and best debut game at the 20th British Academy Games Awards.

It’s no wonder that game developers would take inspiration from Venba. That’s not inherently a bad thing, unless you’re doing what mobile game developer Global Advertising Network LTD — lol — is doing: Whitewashing out any of the things that make Venba incredible, blatantly cribbing its art style, and turning it into a sloppy mobile cash grab. 

Global Advertising Network’s game Sofra is marketed as a cooking simulator and released some time in 2024. It’s seemingly gone somewhat under the radar since then, though the Google Play Store lists it as having more than 10,000 downloads. There’s no story; it simply takes the gameplay mechanics and art style of Venba, following recipes to create inspired, creative dishes like, uh, peanut butter and jelly. As you might expect, there’s a microtransaction for everything — to earn more coins, remove ads, and to unlock levels like the vague “Asian Food Pack.”

 Visai Games called out Sofra on BlueSky: “If you ever wanted a version of Venba where you get to make sandwiches instead of Tamil food and don't have to contend with themes of like dealing with racism, then I have good news for you! This mobile game rip-off with stolen assets is for you!!”

Aftermath has reached out to Visai Games, Global Advertising Network, Apple, and Google for comment.

This is, unfortunately, not a unique phenomena for mobile gaming, and it’s something that’s spreading elsewhere, like onto the Nintendo Switch Store. Global Advertising Network, unsurprisingly, is a prolific copycat developer: Its most popular game, Find Sort Match: Puzzle game is a blatant ripoff of Secret Mode’s 2022 release A Little to the Left. According to the Google Play Store, Find Sort Match: Puzzle game has been downloaded more than 5 million times on that platform alone. As with Venba, it takes both the concept and art style of the game and makes a cheap copy of it. It’s also got games that resemble Bad North, Frostpunk, and Stacklands.

These sorts of low effort clone games are a major issue on mobile app stores. Apple’s guidelines include a section specifically about copycat games: “Come up with your own ideas. We know you have them, so make yours come to life. Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or UI and pass it off as your own. In addition to risking an intellectual property infringement claim, it makes the App Store harder to navigate and just isn’t fair to your fellow developers.”

Games can be removed, according to the guidelines, due to copyright claims or if they are “impersonating” another game or app. It’s unclear whether Sofra would fall into that category of impersonation; its art style is clearly a copy, but unlike in the copycat situation with Unpacking recently, it’s not directly using the game’s name. Some developers have moved to the court system to force app stores to take action: Poppy Playtime developer Mob Entertainment filed a lawsuit in January over “scam” versions of its games. Mob Entertainment issued DMCA takedown requests to get the games removed from the Google Play Store, but they were later readded. That lawsuit is still ongoing. In May, Google filed a motion to dismiss, saying that Google isn’t responsible, and that Mob Entertainment should go after the infringing game developer instead.