Summary
- A Mario Strikers clone called Mariostro Strikers: Soccer League has popped up on the Xbox Store.
- Its key art and description appear to be AI-generated.
- It likely won’t be up for long before Nintendo swoops in to take it down.
Shameless clones of well-performing games, usually with minimal effort put into them, cropping up on various storefronts is nothing new. However, Mariostro Strikers: Soccer League, an incredibly transparent copycat of Mario Strikers: Battle League, might well take home the award for the most blatant and shameless ripoff game we have seen so far.
Spotted by Nintendo Life – but seemingly, and shockingly, available since January 10, 2025 – the Mario Strikers clone is currently available to buy exclusively through the Xbox Games Store for $3.99. Quite the deal for a game that is clearly claiming to be Xbox‘s answer to Nintendo‘s iconic soccer spinoff Mario Strikers, although a quick look at its store page confirms Mariostro Strikers probably isn’t worth four cents, let alone four dollars.
Before you ask, no, Mariostro Strikers isn’t on Game Pass.
You don’t need to look too closely at the clone’s key art to find evidence that the image has almost certainly been AI-generated. My guess is the sharp minds over at LightGamess input “A guy who looks like Mario playing football” and when it spat out the below they shrugged and said, “That’ll do”.
Mariostro Strikers: Soccer League Is Available On Xbox Right Now
Although I Imagine Nintendo Will Put A Stop To That In Five, Four, Three…
The controllers Mariostro’s characters are using towards the front of the image, the facial expressions get worse the closer you look, the random stretchy arm reaching up out of the crowd, the longer you look at it, the worse it gets. AI also appears to be just as bad at piecing together what a football is supposed to look like as it is at generating human hands.
Mariostro Striker’s key art isn’t even the best/worst part of all this. That award goes to the first sentence of the game’s official description: “Dive into the thrilling world of arcade-style soccer with [Your Game Name Here]!” That’s right, the devs at LightGamess were in such a hurry to get their Mario ripoff up on the Xbox store that it forgot to put the name of the game in the description after presumably asking ChatGPT to write it for them.
While copycat games slip through the cracks and appear on storefronts all the time, this might be the most egregious example so far. It’s also the most surprising. Anyone trying to rip off Nintendo in this way is either very brave or very stupid and it’s surprising the Mario studio hasn’t taken it down yet. My guess is Nintendo’s lawyers nuke this game from existence now people are starting to notice it, possibly before you’ve finished reading this sentence.
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