Are Godville's English and Russian versions the same exact game?

Godville is what's known as a ZPG (Zero Player Game) - it's a MMORPG where you - the player - don't actually control the hero in typical RPG way - the hero levels up without player doing any work. The player just sits around and rewards/punishers the hero.

There appear to be two very similar versions of Godville around - an English one (godvillegame.com) and a Russian one (godville.net).

http://godvillegame.com/images/godville_screenshot_en.gif

http://godville.net/images/godville_screenshot_ru.gif

As can be seen from the above screenshots, the two versions seem to be very close, apparently using nearly identical web back-ends (and there are even Andorid clients that can play both).

Please note that content-wise, they are somewhat different - Russian one is nearly 100% culture tropes and puns whereas English one seems to be more standard RPG content.

The question: what is the exact relationship (organizational and software wise) between both games?

• is it really the same exact game ported by the same company to two different markets?

• or is one of them an authorized clone using the same exact software (or starting off from the same software - there seem to be some divergent features) as the original;

• or is one just an unauthorized clone of another?

• Some other option I didn't think of?

They're the same game - the publisher is the same in the Android market: Godville Games Limited.

They are the two different versions of the same game created by the same releaser, while the Russian game was the original and only several years after its release came an idea to do the same in English language. The principals behind the games are the same, but the mechanics of the games are a little bit different, generally being the Russian original version a little bit tougher in gameplay, for example the bosses are a bit nastier, etc. In texts some phrases are direct translation from the Russian game, mostly for the wide spread mems from internationally recognized books and movies. However in English language game version the text content is filled with inputs from English speaking players and quite a substantional part of the texts are unique for it, exactly the same way as many jokes in Russian Godville are understandable only for the carriers of the Russian culture. So answer to the question is both yes and no.