Japanese Cat Collecting Game 'Neko Atsume' Has Been Cloned for Dog People

Earlier this year, the Japanese app Neko Atsume made waves worldwide. Despite having an entirely Japanese interface, the app's laid-back gameplay, where you set food and toys out for cats in a virtual yard and hope rare kitties will stop by to visit, proved engaging and endearing enough to cross the language barrier and earn thousands of fans from abroad. It eventually led to an English localized version, which launched a few months ago.

Of course, maybe the appeal of collecting cats isn't really your thing. Maybe you're more of a dog person. A canine version of Neko Atsume seems like it'd be the logical next step, right? That's where the dog-gathering followup, Boku to Wanko (Dogs and Me) comes in.

Except, despite what some rumors and reports might lead you to believe, it's not a followup at all.

Neko Atsume was developed by Nagoya, Japan-based mobile game studio Hit-Point. It made numerous other titles, of which Neko Atsume is their most visible. They also develop many mobile JRPGs for publisher Kemco. Boku to Wanko is made by a different company entirely: a firm called Chronus Inc. with a bare-bones website and games that all seem very similar to other popular things. I saw at least one knockoff of mega-popular mobile game Monster Strike on there, and another game that looks like it's piggybacking hard off of the popularity of Love Live: School Idol Project, a game where you gather and train a gaggle of anime schoolgirls to be idols.

App cloning is a serious problem for mobile developers. There's seemingly little that can be done to stem the tide of fly-by-night opportunists looking to cash in on the hot mobile trends with lazy reskins of existing game concepts: Apple and Google generally seem reluctant to remove anything that isn't blatant copyright infringement of an existing property.

It's not really surprising, then, that Chronus latch onto Neko Atsume bandwagon. What is surprising is just how much they've copied it in Boku to Wanko. The base gameplay is exactly the same with only very minor difference: you put food and toys out periodically, wait for dogs to come visit, take photos, make albums, and get various gifts from the visiting animals. Elements are re-themed to fit the dog theme: the sardines that acted as the game's currency in Neko Atsume are now bones, and many toys have been turned into different things.

It's the wholesale copy of Neko Atsume's style that's the most jaw-dropping part, though. The reason why people thought Boku to Wanko was an official followup to Neko Atsume is that the simple, heavy-lined art is deliberately designed to mimic its style. Several of the animations are similar to the point where they look traced directly from Neko Atsume as well. A lot of app reskins look "off," but Boku to Wanko can easily masquerade as the real deal.

The thing is, if all you want is "Neko Atsume but with dogs," you probably don't care about the ethics behind the app, you just want to a low-stress game with cute puppies. It's that attitude, however, that allows low-effort stuff like this to flood app stores worldwide, squeezing out honest developers who struggle to get their games noticed. If you really, truly want to support a doggie version of Neko Atsume, you should voice it to Hit-Point rather than playing this blatant attention grab.