One Hour One Life Forums

Jason, just trying to save you some time and irritation here (again, so that we might move on)

No, what they have said is
1. The code of the apk is from us
2. The other assets in the apk are within our rights to use

We have a speech filter component in there, among other components. We bought a license for it, so we are within our rights to use it. That doesn't mean that the author of that component can't sell it in China, or that someone else (you, in your example) is prohibited from using the same component in your own apk, provided you get a license too.

I think that you have already agreed that at the time this was done in China, we were authorised to use your assets, so their claim was true.
When you say "entirely copyrighted", you are misunderstanding what the copyright is. There is nothing entire about it.

Your game's name is "One Hour One Life" and no-one has trade-marked that except you, and you are free to use it in China too. But regarding the trademark issue of the Chinese title, I can repeat again what I have already told you: The publisher has submitted documentation to withdraw their claim to the trademark. Since we are switching names anyway, there will be neither an unregistered trademark in use (within a week or two), nor any registered trademark lying lurking somewhere, when you make your hypothetical release in China.

In conclusion: You can absolutely release your game on mobile in China, under the name you wish. Nothing in the current situation is stopping you now or in the future.

Further, you declared that you had withdrawn your take-down requests, and we responded with an action plan which you accepted (and pushed quite a bit further, which we accepted). But in your thread about TapTap, you now mention that your take-down request discussion is still being pressed forward with employees at TapTap!

If you do agree on the plan, then please drop your takedown discussion with TapTap at this point. You can't have both an agreement with us and continue campaigning against us at the same time.

Updated the actions in the other thread. Post #2.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5534

We are still working on laying out our improvements, but in the mean time, I am telling my side of the story here: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 614#p48614

This is not to tear at the wound, but to give my side of the story. I feel that's fair at this point.

This is breaking my heart.

I have given one year of my life to this game, without vacations, holidays or much sleep. Heart, mind and soul. So have others.

There is a unique beauty in this game, and we wanted to bring it out from a fairly small community, to as many as possible.

Jason and we have an agreement since about a year, which he is now breaking. Yes, Jason has spent four years and is the original creator. He is also the one who told me that it was available for us to work with and bring to mobile, with absolutely no restrictions or requirements, he had placed it in the public domain. No requirements then nor in the future, was the promise. This was an empty promise, it now seems, and it may cost us dearly that we believed it. I don’t think anyone will trust Jason’s opinion on public domain again.

Jason’s interpretation of that video is questionable at best. There are elements that are true and the rest is his feelings. The fraud he is claiming has not happened. There was no claim of full authorship. We have always given full credit to Jason, except in this one instance, when it was handled by a third party. Thus, he is not speaking truth about us now, and I trust that he has also not done so in the takedown requests he has issued. How else could they be approved?

I have apologised for the hurt Jason felt over being left out in that one-minute video, and more importantly, acted to immediately rectify it. I accept the blame for that, but I also maintain that it does not invalidate our agreement. It also doesn’t change the concept of the public domain. Jason has no moral or legal right to blackmail us into submitting to his requirements.

This is Jason's forum. It is naturally inclined in his favour. Yet, many have stepped forward and implored him to work with us to find more reasonable solutions to his complaints. Perhaps because you care a lot about him. Credit to you for your integrity.

We will see where this ends. I want to maintain some hope of reconciliation, but right now I can only feel emptiness.

Ok, so the fan was dead wrong. Thanks for restoring my world view, Chard. Jeez.

One thread which is recurring here is that the understanding in the community for which is what, needs to be improved. The amount of ideas contributed in this forum thread has been a good inspiration and we have begun taking steps to implement some of them. This could have happened sooner, if I had just been notified by Jason that he wasn't happy about the situation. Better sooner than later though. The "actual" Android launch in China hasn't happened yet and we have some time to put more info in place before it does. We will try our best to
- put bug reporting inside the game
- Info screen that you have to actually say "I understand" to the first time, and which can be found again through an info button later.
- Further improve wording in App Store listings and in various more seldom seen places.
- In China (the only place where the app name is not in English) there name was too closely translated from OHOL, so we will make sure to use a different name than the one Chinese people use for the PC version.

Some of this will happen sooner and some will take more time, but we should at least hit Jason's three-week target.

This may not include "punitive damages" (as it shouldn't, brrr), but the actual improvements will happen. If there was a growing problem, I'd have hoped for a more cooperative spirit and a striving on both sides for win-win solutions a long time ago instead, but these changes are the decent thing to do and will be good for everyone, players as well as game developers.

Quite right, fragilityh14!

Jason, I'll attempt to answer your post #72 now:

On onetech.info:
This is a great site and I use it all the time. I'm glad it doesn't cause any emails to you, but I get both emails, forum posts and tweets about how "it's buggy" (because of misunderstandings - not actual bugs), "it's only correct for PC", "why is there no support for my language", etc. The latest such post is in the very thread you linked to in our forum.
I also get requests about the PC version. Confusion happens in the reality we are dealing with here. We can take more steps to limit it, but we can never get rid of it entirely. It's good to keep that in mind when looking for solutions.

It's possible that we never should have picked the name we did. It has added to confusion, but it has also added benefits to both of us. Maybe the benefits have outweighed the downsides, maybe not. We can't know for sure.

When we did pick the name, you made one thing clear to me:
Don't lie to other people by claiming that it was entirely made by ourselves, since that could deceive someone into buying the wrong thing.

Regarding this, you specifically made it clear that it was not about attribution to you. In fact, attribution was entirely voluntary:

So this rule only had to do about a strongly held principle that you shouldn't lie to people, and particularly not when your work was involved.

This made quite an impression on me, and I have carried it with me since. I thought you a unique person and I remembered what your priorities were, because of this. We still put your name in there though, why wouldn't we?

In October, we sent quite some emails to each other. You felt a need for clarification. In addition to 1, you were now also concerned about one more thing:

For us the ball had just started rolling after a struggle with bad numbers in September. I am sure I was reluctant to rock the boat, but nevertheless we made an agreement to put the word unofficial in descriptions and splash screens. I now remembered your two priorities:
1. Don't lie to other people by claiming that it was entirely made by yourself, since that could deceive someone into buying the wrong thing.
2. Don't claim that Jason made this app, since that could mess with his legacy.

So to the TapTap debacle:
You already know how the text came to be missing in both the description and the splash screen. Miscommunication in the first and misunderstanding in the second.
It seems that the video was the really infuriating thing to you though, so lets talk about that now.

The publisher wanted to do a movie about the purpose of the game (it is the unique factor with the game, so this makes sense). They asked me to shoot myself explaining what I thought was special about it. They also asked for shots of the team members. We used an iPhone and about 10 minutes for this, because we simply had no time. After working with this project since March, it didn't seem strange to me that I should talk about the game, nor that the team involved should say hi.
We sent the clips, and they made a movie clip out of it. We saw it once it had been uploaded to taptap. We had no time to be involved, but of course I looked at it. I agree with you now, that from your point of view it can look like "meet the team behind OHOL" rather than "meet the team behind OHOL for Mobile". At the time my only thought was: "Ok, the sound quality is bad and it's apparent that I didn't rehearse it, but they have their video." Funny how they renamed Pontus into Otis". In fact we renamed Pontus to Otis in our team chat. That's how much effort we put into making this video, we didn't even bother correcting his name.

By telling you this, I am not saying the video wasn't a big deal. I understand that it was. But there was no malice in it. The intent you believe was there, simply wasn't. Only stressed out people with too much work on their plate to stop and really think about how it would seem to you.

Also, I feel I have to make something clear here: There is a game called "One Hour One Life for Mobile" and there is a team which is making it. It is a game first and an "unofficial adaptation" second. It's not an unofficial game, and it is made by us, based on your game. And currently, this game is officially the only game on the AppStore with OHOL gameplay in it. You need to stop thinking of it as one PC game plus an appendix. We have also spent man-years on our game. OHOL belongs to you, and OHOL for Mobile belongs to us. That was always our agreement.

Now to your damage claim:

Let's compare this to the two rules you have set up for us, and on which our agreement is built:
1. Don't lie to people about the origin.
Here you claim that by omission, we have let people think that the game they see was entirely made by us, potentially tricking them into downloading it, thinking that they couldn't get it anywhere else.
I agree that the mistakes we had made created such a potential situation, but where is the damage to these people? This was a free trial download and no money changed hands. Clearly no fraud happened.
Again, your words:

So there is also no damage to you, in this regard. If an unknown number of people who could have learnt that OHOL was from you, didn't, this does not violate our agreement. You can't claim damage for the lack of attribution, because you have made it very clear that you don't require that attribution. To me personally, and in your statement of "no copyright".

2. Don't claim that Jason made this app, since that could mess with his legacy.
Well, our entire error in this instance was that we didn't let people know that there was a PC game which we had built ours on. Clearly, we did not claim you had anything to do with our app. Also no violation of our agreement, and no damage to you.

I think that you got mad about China (which is understandable) and used it for leverage against an agreement that doesn't suit you anymore. But the damage you claim as justifiable reason to make your demands punitively "harsh", is inconsistent with your promises to and requirements of us. There is no reason to be harsh. Let's be fair instead. We could still amend the agreement.

We have an agreement, and we made an error. In all agreements, the standard is that if an error occurs, there is a time frame to rectify the error once it has become known. If the appropriate action is taken, then the agreement stands. We did act with all possible speed to rectify the error once it became known to us. Thus the agreement stands.

However, the reason for the agreement remains. We love your game and we love our game, which wouldn't exist in its current form without you. We want to do right by you. We want your legacy to be the way you want it.

Here is where conversation comes to play. I understand that you now feel that our original agreement didn't go far enough, once our user numbers skyrocketed. So yes, let's talk about how we can reduce confusion between games and increase the understanding for what works do and don't belong in your body of work. I am at your disposal in this.

If you had stated at the beginning that our game should be called "unofficial" and have strange texts in the UI implying that it shouldn't exist, we would not have spent a year of our team's time and resources on this. Thousands of people who have played OHOLm would be the poorer for it. No matter if we still are able to sell the game, we don't want to work on "Unofficial OHOL". We have said that we are willing to work on "OHOL Mobile Mod" and that we also will clarify other wording. Most people on this forum will tell you that this is a great offer. (If someone else had the strength to read all the way here, feel free to agree or disagree).

The reason there is no confusion from 2HOL is the lack of user base. What we now know, is that when a derivative work of a public domain game reaches users in the 6-digit range, the number of confused people also increases. I believe this is inevitable, but that we can do more than we have done to limit it. You haven't exactly posted on your page that OHOLm exists and how it differs from OHOL, have you? Maybe you should at this time, to improve the understanding of your legacy? We also have places where we haven't thought to make the distinction as clear as possible. We are willing to improve on this.

If I pushed back too much the last time we agreed, you have certainly pushed forward this time. Now take your win and be gracious about it! I ask you to work with us on your own goals. To our mutual benefit, and that of many many players, now and in the future. Let's get back to work?

I still think that a phone call or live meeting would use much less time and yield better results than writing on your forum. Can't you please consider it?

Jason, this is perfect proof that the wording you demand is misleading.
"Not approved by Jason Rohrer" is equivalent to "Not permitted by Jason Rohrer" or "Against the wishes of Jason Rohrer". Since you don't mean any of that, the statement is misleading the reader into believing a falsehood. Couldn't you ask for a wording that is not misleading? Thanks for your consideration.

I don't believe that's true. Even if 100,000 Chinese actually have that impression (which I seriously doubt), I offer this by way of balance: shortly after out China debut, one individual caught the buzz and went looking for the PC original. He then posted a video of playing the game here:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av43201378/
This video has more than 2.5 million views by now, so that's a lot more than 100,000 people seeing the original game. So, I think some good has been done to the PC community as a side effect.
You were definitely owed a sincere apology, and some quick actions. But we did some good too, can't you agree with that?

Actually, I'm saying "the games design", as a noun.

You told me you wanted a boiler plate added to that video, and it was added immediately. If you had told me to remove it instead, it would have been removed. If you weren't ok with the change you asked for, why ask for it?

Set in motion perhaps. That's all one can reasonably hope for by Sunday.

If we can't make everything the way you want it by the time you want it, what is the next step? Ask us to stop using your assets and code? Make the game not public domain anymore? Start defaming us? None of that sounds like you.

If we make everything look according to your specification, then you will have become one of the designers of our app. As a games designer, would you put your name on the re-design you want there? Do you want that as part of your legacy? Sabotaging us after leading us on? It's not how you have come across before and I hope that it's mostly anger speaking now. That said, I am acting on your words at face value. Consider things set in motion, then. I hope we will arrive at something you can feel comfortable with, as soon as possible. And if you have more ideas in the meanwhile, I am listening.

Well, we did (and I wrote so above). Jason told us to go ahead with China on our own. He even sent contact information for another publisher who had been in direct contact with him.