• SSUPII
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    1 year ago

    I DO NOT SUPPORT CANDYWRITER. Play the original Instlife, the game the company Candywriter bought and deleted to destroy the competition. You being on Android you can grab an .apk file of it.

    Instlife was developed by InstCoffee, a group of two indie game developers. Candywriter was at the time a 10 people company.

    Instlife began development in 2016, and started gaining raising traction in 2017. BitLife was released for iOS only during the Instlife massive boom in popularity in 2018, while Instlife still had no iOS version. Bitlife gained steam thanks to a few dirty tactics (Instlife ran no ad campaigns and completely free, while Bitlife constantly spent on video ads on other games and websites and had a in-game barrier forcing people to share the game on Twitter if they wanted to have all features) and being the only game on iOS of its type it during the boom of course started doing numbers.

    For every Instlife update, Bitlife would come 1 week later with the exact same feature as a carbon copy. (With Instlife gone, Bitlife actually diverged heavily from the original concept).

    When Instlife began making and distributing its iOS version, Bitlife started losing players moving to the original and at the time much more complete and polished game. Not too long after the iOS release, Candywriter bought full rights to Instlife (the amount of money was never disclosured, but the acquisition was confirmed by both parties). It lasted a week under the new ownership, where it then got silently removed from both Play Store and Apple App Store and followed tweet from Candywriter announcing the acquisition and the imminent release of the Android port of Bitlife.

    • MusketeerX@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ha, interesting I’d never heard of any of this, I was quite late to the game. This sort of crap p*sses me off.

      Will check out the original.