When Lithuanian developer Deep Sea Marketing launched its app Plague last year, there was a fair bit of confusion over its app and a popular game by Ndemic Creations called Plague Inc. Now Ndemic has asked Deep Sea to change the app’s name, and Deep Sea is kind of obliging. The new name of the app will be “Plag**” with the two asterisks representing blacked out letters in its logo.
Yes, Deep Sea is being cute, but the company has always had a rather twisted sense of humor. After all it named an app designed to facilitate communications between people in disparate parts of world after a global biological catastrophe. For those of you who haven’t tried out Plag**, it doesn’t use social networking principles to spread its content. Rather it distributes content like a disease, infecting users of nearby smartphones who further infect new users they come in contact with.
To be fair, Plague Inc. is pretty twisted as well, though highly addictive. In the game you control a pathogen, and your goal is infect and wipe out the entire world’s population before the globe’s scientific community can research a cure. My favorite level is “Neurax Worm,” a parasitic organism that burrows into its host’s brain.
Deep Sea is launching a new website plag.com as well, and while Deep Sea may not be thrilled it needs to undergo a semi-rebranding as it’s just gaining international attention – it reported 150,000 users in January two months after launch – the move will hopefully prevent some confusion. Web and apps store searches for “Plague” intermix results for both apps, and they both use many of the same epidemic-related terms in their marketing.
