The company behind Vita Mahjong, Amaze Go and Meowdoku has already lost one copyright infringement case against Block Blast maker Hungry Studio, and is fighting another brought by Avia Games.
Oakever Games has scored a string of mobile game hits with titles including Paint By Number, Tile Explorer, Jigsawscapes and Zen Word. The company also trades as Learnings, and publishes Vita Mahjong under the name Vita Studio. More recently, Oakever titles like Amaze Go and Meowdoku have been riding high in the top downloads charts.
A profile of the company in the Chinese press suggests that the company was founded as Lexin Shengwen in February 2016 by cofounders Liu Yiwei and Li Zhong. The founders met when Yiwei was running AdMob at Google China. The company now has 200-300 employees, and R&D personnel account for 85% of its staff, says the report.
A California judge ruled in favour of Aretis Limited – better known as Block Blast maker Hungry Games – and against Oakever Games in a copyright infringement case this April.
Court reports from the beginning of the case state that Hong Kong-based Aretis, trading as Hungry Games, accused Oakever Games of producing a copy of its hit puzzler Block Blast. The case alleged that Oakever’s puzzler QBlock had “essentially the same artwork and design interface”. The case also accused Oakever of copying some of Block Blast’s audio effects.
Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin found in favour of Hungry Studio on April 15 this year, say further court documents. QBlock has since been rebranded as Wood Block Puzzle Games, and looks similar to Tripledot’s Woodoku.
A second copyright infringement case was filed against Oakever by Avia Games in December 2025. The case is still ongoing, but court reports from the initial filings accuse Oakever of copying eight copyrighted ads produced by Avia Games, and allege that Oakever simply pasted its game’s names and studio logo over the top of the ones in Avia’s original ads.
The case has stalled somewhat, but it is ongoing. Oakever has since been found to have not submitted the relevant documentation that could allow the case to continue. Avia has been granted the ability to pursue litigation through alternative means.
The copycat accusations don’t stop there. One prominent CEO told us that they and several other large publishers have alerted platform holders Apple and Google to Oakever’s practices. Google is at least monitoring the situation, the CEO said, but they told us that “Apple is doing nothing”.
When contacted about this issue, Google did not respond. Apple, however, confirmed to us that some developers had successfully used the App Store’s content dispute process to force Oakever to change or remove apps purported to be clones. It said there have been multiple disputes of this nature.
Apple also directed us towards App Store Review Guideline 4.1, which makes clear that impersonating other apps or services is considered a violation of its rules and can result in removal from the App Store and the Apple Developer Programme.
For further context, Learnings released a competitor to Miniclip-owned Lessmore’s Arrows game in April, called Arrows Go. By May, the game’s title had changed to Amaze Go.
“[Oakever’s] entire strategy is to copy others’ work,” alleges our anonymous CEO. “The ad networks aren’t doing anything because [Oakever] is plying them with cash…they are undoing all the good work all these other Chinese developers, like Microfun, are doing.”
The source continued: “Developers are becoming increasingly alarmed by the normalisation of copying in the market, especially when some actors openly frame it as a business strategy. That trend risks having a chilling effect on innovation. If original ideas can be rapidly cloned and pushed into the same storefronts, the incentive to take creative risks is weakened, and the stores themselves become less valuable to consumers.”
“No game exists in a vacuum. Developers are inspired by one another, and the medium has always advanced through reference, iteration and shared design language. But there is a meaningful distinction between inspiration and conduct that appears intended to confuse consumers or pass one product off as another.”
“The speed at which some of these games have been copied or ‘inspired’ competing products is unprecedented. If the industry cannot maintain some semblance of self-regulation, we should expect to see more of these disputes resolved through litigation rather than through platform standards or professional norms.”
We have contacted Oakever for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.
