There’s too many games. And there’s definitely too many clone games, developers using AI or their own human nefariousness to confuse players about which game they’re actually buying. But we also live in a big, big world, where sometimes people just make games that are a lot alike. The developers of two games called Piece by Piecehave embraced this coincidence.
One Piece by Piece, released on Steam on March 11, is a repair shop sim starring animals. The other Piece by Piece, released on Steam on March 13, is a platformer where you build the levels out of jigsaw pieces. They’re nothing alike beyond their names and release dates, but I could certainly see how people browsing Valve’sincreasingly useless storefront might get confused or suspect one is a ripoff of the other.
As spotted by Polygon, developers of both games joined a conversation about this on reddit back in March to clear things up. Someone from No More Robots, publisher of repair shop Piece by Piece, wrote that “both ourselves and the dev team behind the other Piece by Piece somehow managed to announce the same week of release for both our games [and] had a good laugh about it together.” One of the devs from Neon Polygons, the studio behind the puzzle Piece by Piece,replied that “As a small indie team you might imagine how we felt when we first saw No More Robots’ Piece by Piece. They’ve handled this coincidence with nothing but grace and we’re honored to share the same name/launch week as them.” The two games decided to release together in a bundle, called “Piece by Piece Double.”
Now, both games are coming to Switch, and they’ve decided to do a <a href="https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/piece-by-piece-double-bundle-switch/?srsltid=AYCX9vIR3VZVE6Y_xtiFBmZp1VNBu_LVgiEQ0XAaVryyR-ewoqir0usD&ref=aftermath.site” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>bundle again–apparently, much to the chagrin of Nintendo. According to Video Game Chronicle, when No More Robots learned that Neon Polygons “didn’t have the finances” to release on Switch, they decided to publish the platforming game so both games could release together.
No More Robots’ Mike Rose wrote on Bluesky that “Nintendo have ABSOLUTELY HATED THIS. We’ve been asked the question ‘why do you have two games with the same name’ many, many times by cert.”
“Anyway, mega happy to be helping [Neon Polygons] out with such a fun thing. Not all publishers are evil, I promise,” Rose wrote.
I find this entire thing utterly charming, and I particularly enjoy the wordplay of both games’ identical names, one riffing on the noun of puzzle pieces and the other riffing on the verb of piecing things back together. In an age when you’d expect most situations like this to involve dueling cease-and-desists, it’s nice that both developers can have some fun with it.
