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 💖
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
is it true that choices have removed their shitty AI it lives within from its server ?!
This is true! They removed both It Lives Within and Hero from run.tv and the choices app.
Here's the part of their announcement that's relevant to our project specifically:
We’ve seen the conversations happening around It Lives Within, and we wanted to take a moment to address them directly.
Our intention was always to tell a new story within the world of It Lives; not to draw from or overshadow the incredible work created by members of this community. We understand that some of the similarities being discussed have caused concern and we appreciate everyone who has taken the time to share their thoughts respectfully.
After listening to your feedback and having a number of conversations internally, we’ve made the decision to remove both It Lives Within and Hero: Homecoming from both Choices and RUN.tv. We have also removed Gilded Scales from Choices.
It was a bit surreal to, after all these years, have our project mentioned specifically by Choices staff, and to realize that the backlash regarding the plagiarism was likely one of the major reasons they walked back these stories. While I'm not thrilled that run ILW was a thing in the first place, I'm glad that they made the decision to take it down, and I'm especially grateful to such a dedicated community who went out to bat on our behalf ❤️
hi! firstly, I wanted to say how much I appreciate ILW and all the work you've put into it because the game is just SO good. artwork, LIs, character customisation, EVERYTHING has been given such attention to detail which makes the game genuinely perfect. that being said, i haven't played in a while bc ive been keeping an eye out for the obsidian cut !! do you perhaps have a release date for us eager fans... 😘
Thank you so much for your message 💖💖 every time we get a message showing love for our work, it makes my day.
To answer your question… I am working on the final edits but I’ve slowed down. I’m preparing to take the NCE (national counselor exam for counseling licensure in the US) and my sister who I write with is in town for a few months, so we’ve been working on editing one of our books while I’ve also been editing ILW, and going to school and working 😅
So got a lot on my plate, but still working on ILW and making consistent, if slower, progress
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.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
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.
without too many spoilers, what has been your fav and least fav part of the rewrites
Oh, this is a fun question!
I really like some of the art stuff - all the new customization options, improved UI, and some cool animations! Apart from that, I like the new scenes that are added. We really fleshed out a lot of smaller characters who were one-dimensional and/or underdeveloped, which is fun. I also just find a lot of satisfaction in feeling like the logical flow of the story is improved. Oh, one last thing I really like is that there's a considerable amount more of inter-group interactions and bonding, both as a group, and in pairs.
My least fav part has probably been a lot of coding busywork. We improved a lot of the systems we had from legacy, including automation of a lot of processes, and to make the game consistent we've been going through and reworking the code to use the updated method... and that is a huge pain lol.
