Clone culture and its continuous impact on indie developers

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-02-17-clone-culture-and-its-continuous-impact-on-indie-devs

by amichail • 4 years ago

90 126 4 years ago

pyb• 4 years ago

This is also the case in the startup world. As we saw recently, any tool that begins to take off gets cloned incredibly quickly (Airtable, Roam...). Given the apparent shortage, it goes to show that ideas actually matter.

ushakov2• 4 years ago

devils advocate here

to be honest, expensive, proprietary tools like Airtable, Notion, Retool deserve to be copied

why would you pour significant resources into something that one day can and probably will disappear, cancelled or priced out?

JonAtkinson• 4 years ago

Because in the current environment it's easy to leverage VC money to stay just-ahead in the user-acquisition race, while the early employees extract very nice salaries and build their networks -- which they can use to find their next role when the gravy train ends.

It really doesn't matter a bit if the product survives in the marketplace or not. It just needs to 'succeed' in the short term.

ehnto• 4 years ago

I think when criticizing paid software, and paid SaaS, it's a mistake to think their alternative is logically open-source software. It's actually ad-driven software, because a profitable paid service has to provide much more to you than just the code like open-source does, and that costs money.

I relish tools that just let me pay for them and cut out the middle-man. The idea that all software should be free has contributed to the hyper commercialized, invasive, ad-funded internet we have now.

quadcore4• 4 years ago

Most people in the game industry dont get this: games are, economically, startups (innovative high-growth product), they are not content - like movies. So you have a few killer games and armies of clones which often make their author poor or barely even.

In other words, if you are a game developper, you need to figure out why your product will be a high growth product. You should not treat it as an art exercise (if you wanna succeed economically).

For example, the art style of world of warcraft is not like it is because that was the art style of the art director (well it is but) they did it like this because they knew this was the kind of art that is needed for a high growth product. Everything in world of warcraft (its just an example) has been done to reach high growth, they werent doing an art exercise that happen to be successful. Its a mindset most game developers wont ever get.

Of course you can do art exercises and be lucky. Just be conscious youre playing at the lotery though.

burntoutfire2• 4 years ago

Aren't (commercial) movies the same though? The decisions are made by producers, and their main task is to figure out how to make the movie appealing to the largest possible audience, so that investors will get maximum RoI.

quadcore4• 4 years ago

I know this is difficult to get but people watch a movie and then watch another one. They dont do that with games (not in an economically significant way). People spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on one game. They spend their life on 2-3 games. Its a product, not content.

Ygg22• 4 years ago

Did they or were they just copying Warcraft 3 art style with higher poly count? Or were they continuing the old pre-Warcraft 3 prototype and expanding it into something else?

The thing about cartooney art style vs a realistic one is that it ages better, but they had no way of knowing it would reach globe-shattering popularity. The only thing they can know is that it's a bit less resource intensive (to make and to display). Keep in mind something 2D would be even less resource intensive.

ouid• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure, based on nothing at all but playing the game for a decade or so, that all character animation in world of warcraft is either motion capture, or extremely painstaking animation. Poly counts and cartoonish texturing had very little to do with why the game looked good and aged well. It was the animation that made the difference.

slfnflctd• 4 years ago

something 2D would be even less resource intensive

But then you lose the players that value immersion, who I suspect are also more likely to drive word-of-mouth promotion.

I would not have played WoW nearly as much as I did, or encouraged others to do so, without the option to go first person and turn off (almost) all UI elements-- being able to fully dive into the art design and feel like I was there was more than half the appeal to me. Other MMOs that went 2D/isometric never kept me engaged as long.

bitwize3• 4 years ago

Oh, movies are startups too. Often you see a production company established to make a single movie. And they spawn clones -- Star Wars gave rise to perhaps hundreds of space movies -- many of them really bad.

Dracophoenix• 4 years ago

It depends on the era. Lucasfilm was definitely a startup during its halcyon days(not just in film, but in FX (special and CGI), editing, and sound design). But most of the prolific movies of the era before Lucasfilm were products of the studio system (or what remained of it) whose operating principles mirrored that of IBM.

wink• 4 years ago

At first I had a longer comment how I think you're missing the point, but I think you are right - I just disagree with the startup part because they were actually polishing something for the mainstream (high growth) but it's like you take people who are good at... [proprietary market leader tech] and commoditizing it in a new company... which is well-funded and has worked together.

TrianguloY4• 4 years ago

I've suffered from this cloning culture (for those who find strange the 'culture' part, it's because in some countries cloning something successful is an achievement that apparently is rewarded).

Personally I don't mind clones, ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone, you want to make a better packing game? Ok, go on. But use your own assets, situations, music, etc. Cloning something to try to trick users into thinking yours is the real one is just despicable. And if you don't give credit or even monetize what isn't yours...please consider your life choices.

bartwe• 4 years ago

Why would the music and style be treated as more special than the concept of the game ?

krapp• 4 years ago

Assets and production are what differentiate one game from another. "Concept" more often than not is just a genre marker.

TrianguloY4• 4 years ago

They shouldn't, but the complexity required to be considered different is usually less. For example you probably wouldn't say that Crash bandicot is a clone of Mario Bros, even though both are 2d platformers. But for music or images even if they are only half the same they feel like clones.

Also depends on how 'concept' is defined. Two games where you "unpack things" can be vastly different, but two games where "you unpack things from a packing box and place them on small diorama-like rooms without any objective" is hard to differentiate.

All assets have degrees of genres (platform/shooter/..., rap/classic/..., pixelart/medieval/...). But the amount of things you need to change in order to create an "original work" is not the same for all of them.

nkrisc4• 4 years ago

Barring actual fraud and wholesale theft of art assets, if your idea is copied so easily and consumers apparently can’t team the difference between your game and a clone, do you really have a viable product or were you just the first person to think of an easily commoditized idea?

Games that endure usually have something unique about then that resonates with consumers, despite the existence of clones. That might be the characters, the story, that intangible touch of the original artist some game clone sweatshop can’t replicate.

You can get a burger anywhere, but I bet every city has at least one burger place that just makes it better, the atmosphere is better, the beer menu better, and there’s always a line out the door.

Are games really any different?

The example at the beginning of the article looks like it’s different art in the same style. But if it’s a game and not an actual scam, so what?

This part confused me though:

Clones impact small developers in more than one way, but the most direct consequence for Witch Beam was a rise in confused players which in turn can grow into bad PR for the studio and its staff being overwhelmed by demands.

"People were going to our website and being confused, thinking that this is part of the sign-up process to play the game through this app that they got, and signing up to our mailing list thinking that they're signing up to play the game," Brier explains. "We were just flooded with mailing list sign-ups, which then brought us up a tier on Mailchimp, for these low-quality subscribers. And they're low quality because they don't want to be subscribers, and they might even mark us as spam if they get our emails.

Where were these confused players coming from? Sounds like the site was designed poorly from a UX perspective.

ReactiveJelly• 4 years ago

I agree, games are the same.

The problem is that solo indie doesn't work well in any medium.

Everything worth doing benefits from having team members. I think novelists are the closest to still doing things solo, but they still have publishers, editors, beta readers, proofreaders, sensitivity readers, people who check their research if they care about historical accuracy, etc.

I think there was a slow-motion bubble from maybe the 1980s until the 2010s where solo indie game dev worked because:

- Video games were hard to make

- Computers were hard to use

- The tools sucked

- Almost nobody knew how to program

So if you were a smart person who could program half-decently, you had the makings of a game. Now the world is better, and the solo style is left behind.

I don't know much about music, but I speculate musicians would say the same. You might be able to play a bunch of instruments, do your own mixing, publish yourself on Bandcamp and whatever, but dollar for dollar most of the industry is singers who don't write their own songs, backup dancers with no names, and session musicians who are in the studio when the recording is done.

Calling it "clone culture" misses the point: Games are easy to make now. Indie dev is probably never going to be as hip as when Braid came out. And even Jon Blow didn't do it solo, he bought the music and I think contracted an artist for Braid. Specialization works, scale works.

wincy2• 4 years ago

As a counterpoint, there is Stardew Valley.

Stardew Valley came entirely out of left field, ConcernedApe released a pixel graphics farming sim of all things, made $35 million dollars because he’d literally done it all himself, even the game engine, and the niche (farming games) he was competing with, including games like Harvest Moon which has teams of developers pumping out absolute crap compared to what he made. Then again he wasn’t necessarily doing it to make money in the first place, it uses “timeless” pixel art, and he spent 6 or so years making the game with no actual time limit to when he could release it (as he had a day job and wasn’t going to run out of money).

And the game just has a soul that makes it feel great to play and be in. I just got around to playing it this year and absolutely love it.

bitwize3• 4 years ago

Barring actual fraud and wholesale theft of art assets, if your idea is copied so easily and consumers apparently can’t team the difference between your game and a clone, do you really have a viable product or were you just the first person to think of an easily commoditized idea?

Under U.S. copyright law, game clones infringe copyright. See Atari v. Philips: Philips developed a game, K.C. Munchkin! for the Magnavox Odyssey2, that looked and played like Pac-Man (which Atari had exclusive home console rights to). The sprites were completely different, the maze layout was different, and there were a few different mechanics. Nevertheless the judge determined that K.C. Munchkin! was similar enough to Pac-Man as to be infringing.

Another example: Tetris, one of the most heavily defended game IPs of all time. The Tetris Company claims copyright on the concept of a falling-tetromino game with the characreristics of Tetris, and has won court cases (e.g. Tetris Holdings v. Xio) defending that copyright. Writing a Tetris clone is asking for contact from TTC's lawyers.

The example at the beginning of the article looks like it’s different art in the same style. But if it’s a game and not an actual scam, so what?

It's "substantially similar" under U.S. copyright law, which may make it infringing.

the_af4• 4 years ago

Another example: Tetris, one of the most heavily defended game IPs of all time. The Tetris Company claims copyright on the concept of a falling-tetromino game with the characreristics of Tetris, and has won court cases (e.g. Tetris Holdings v. Xio) defending that copyright.

IANAL and really confused about this, but... how can you claim copyright over a "concept"? That sounds more like a patent to me. You can trademark names, e.g. tetris, and patent a mechanism for falling pieces, but how can you "copyright" a game concept? In my mind, copyright refers to actually copying large portions of the "content", which in tetris case would be... the assets? Are you sure the lawsuit wasn't about patents?

bluedino2• 4 years ago

2048 needed better lawyers

int_19h2• 4 years ago

The story with Tetris largely revolves around the trademark on the name itself, and various associated visual designs. You can still make a Tetris clone, though.

pengaru2• 4 years ago

Burgers are hot food inherently consumed near their origin.

Games are software, there's not really much equivalence here.

In lieu of software patents, software has no means of preventing clones outside of using high production value (expensive to develop) as a moat.

I don't think it's particularly great for indie creators, to implicitly tell them "make your games more expensive to clone (more expensive for you to develop) if you want to actually keep a roof over your head." A fun creative game worth playing isn't necessarily costly to develop, but this situation is strongly discouraging such games from being made.

But that's the world we live in now, games are basically yet another starving artist industry.

Back on the subject of hot foods, VICE just did a story on a NYC pizzeria clone serving a community increasingly composed of folks who once lived near the original pizzeria. It resulted in mob "meetings" and an unexplained murder of the original pizzeria's owner...

orangecat• 4 years ago

I don't think it's particularly great for indie creators

Maybe not, but the alternative is worse. I don't want federal judges declaring that Torchlight is illegal because it's too close to Diablo.

games are basically yet another starving artist industry

Yes, this is the market correctly telling potential game developers that there's an oversupply and they should consider doing something else.

nkrisc4• 4 years ago

I think it still applies, even if it’s not an exact analogy. Consider a lawn mowing service. Anyone with a lawn mower in your neighborhood can compete with you and charge less. So you need to offer more than just the fact you’re mowing their lawn for $X, or if consumers only care about price, tough luck.

Yes, lawn mowing services aren’t global over the internet. Not I think the same principle still applies: to have to offer more than just some value proposition that can be copied. The global nature of software just means anyone can compete from anywhere.

CJefferson• 4 years ago

Developing a fun game takes huge amounts of time -- many ideas are thrown away, you have to worry about balance, length. Most games are an "easily commoditized idea".

Coming up with an idea, then balancing a cool new 2D puzzle game might take months, or by a once-in-a-lifetime flash of brilliance. Cloning it will take a decent game dev team a month or two.

telchior3• 4 years ago

I think this burger restaurant metaphor is... really not great.

Imagine instead that you've spent two years in a kitchen, working nonstop on a completely new type of food. You've discovered how to make something unprecedented, but it took endless rounds of tweaking ingredients and taste-testing. You open a restaurant to sell your food, and it succeeds massively.

... unfortunately for you, the main ingredients are just flour, eggs, sugar and milk, and for whatever reason, it's pretty easy to reverse-engineer your recipe. Within half a year, a dozen copycat restaurants are all making the same thing, except maybe they sprinkle some powdered sugar or salsa on top.

Now, I don't know what you'd do in the restaurant industry to litigate against that. There's probably some viable path, though, because it's obvious that you created something entirely new, and it can't exist without a specific recipe and method.

In the video game industry, though, it's pretty difficult. Patents don't work very well. The legal system hasn't been kind to people trying to claim ownership of gameplay types, even if it's blatantly obvious that the described gameplay wouldn't exist without that person. Platforms also really don't give a shit (see the recent thread about Apple allowing through dozens of Wordle clones, but that's only the latest in a very long history of App Store clones).

I think it's just a narrow and pretty uncharitable view of game dev that would lead to the thought that it's like opening a restaurant, much less one making some food type that has existed for a century. Creating a new gameplay mechanic is not at all like tossing a new type of pickle on a sandwich.

booleandilemma• 4 years ago

What you describe kinda sorta happened in 2013 NYC with the introduction of the cronut.

A baker created a new type of croissant and it exploded in popularity - overnight success.

It wasn’t long before Dunkin Donuts was selling their own cronuts (they had to use a different name for them though, the baker had trademarked the original name).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronut

nekcihc5• 4 years ago

Without cloning there would not be anything what we have today and no indie developers as well.

DOOM clones was a thing of past. There were many of them. Then Diablo clones - Sacred was one of them I liked. Torchlight or Path of Exile should not exist by the logic of article and OP.

If a clone is better and is outperforming original, then clone makers are doing right thing. In the big view on future, patents or any other restrictions on knowledge are only limiting overall progress.

0ldskool• 4 years ago

this already happens all the time with food... How many unique takes on a given recipe are copied and used by other restaurants??

Tiramisu is an awesome cake from a small mom+pop cafe in Italy, California rolls for sushi, etc...

TrianguloY4• 4 years ago

Games that endure usually have something unique about then that resonates with consumers, despite the existence of clones.

But clones have that exact same unique feature, that's why it's called a clone.

If you played/hear the original, you'll recognize the clone right away. But if you find the clone first, you'll think that's the one with that unique feature. Maybe later you discover the original, but the damage is already done.

foo_barrio• 4 years ago

I don't like this take at all. Copying is always easier than creating no? A lot of times the things that make or break or game are fine tuning the mechanics in order to balance difficulty/reward etc. Once this is done it's trivial to copy.

Games are more like music than food IMO. It's trivial to copy a song once you hear it. That doesn't somehow mean it's not a worthy song.

nkrisc4• 4 years ago

Agreed. It’sa lot of work and it’s easy to copy, so if finely-tuned game mechanics is your only hook for your game, it’ll be hard to compete in the genre since it’s so easily copied. If you’re interested in commercial success for your game, you need value that can’t be so easily copied. Sometimes it’s as basic as having a good community around the game.

aahortwwy4• 4 years ago

if your idea is copied so easily and consumers apparently can’t team the difference between your game and a clone, do you really have a viable product or were you just the first person to think of an easily commoditized idea?

You're diminishing the amount of research and effort that is frequently required to realise an easily commoditized idea. This is why patents exist.

Original game ideas are the product of thousands of hours of experimentation and playtesting. All of that time, effort, and creativity produces a fun mechanic which can often be cloned with ease.

Would you be saying this if we were talking about a non-entertainment product?

What if we were discussing, hypothetically, a novel user interface for medical software which a startup produced after conducting thousands of interviews with doctors across the globe? And then a better funded competitor got their hands on a copy of the software and just replicated the screens in a few weeks?

Or an AI research startup that spent years working on an innovative new model, only for a customer to yoink all the parameters/weights/configuration/whatever and release a competing product backed by a large company?

Buttons840• 4 years ago

Are you arguing that patents should be applicable to games? The problem with that is that people will spend thousands of hours on experimentation and playtesting and then the patent system will swoop in the day after release and tell them they aren't actually allowed to release the thing they invented and created themselves.

michaelmrose4• 4 years ago

You started with the assumption that patents ought to exist and never proved it because you think its obvious. I disagree.

nkrisc4• 4 years ago

If you have something patentable, you might want to patent it.

Original game ideas are the product of thousands of hours of experimentation and playtesting. All of that time, effort, and creativity produces a fun mechanic which can often be cloned with ease.

This is no different than any product, right? If your selling point is so easily copied (and not patentable), it’ll be hard to compete. You need something more than that. It might be good marketing, the right characters, good writing, or even just a good community.

I’m not trying to trivialize the effort devs put in. But unless we’re talking about patenting abstract things like game mechanics, you need something more than just good game mechanics to be commercially successful.

egypturnash• 4 years ago

Fragmented platforms ain’t helping. I decided to finally check out this game (I had a good time with Witch Beam’s first one but this just does not interest me much) and discovered it doesn’t seem to be on the iPad I’m typing this on despite it looking like a total natural for that. It’s on Steam, the Switch, and the Xbox. It is at least available on the Mac via Steam but I would have not been at all surprised if it was Windows only, which would have meant I own nothing that could play it, despite it probably being built in a framework (their previous game was in Unity) that easily exports to the iOS tablets in my hand and the PS4 in my living room.

This is likely due to them signing exclusivity deals that got them money to finish making the game on, but it creates a distinct hole that clones fill, the same way there were a thousand Pac-Man clones on the home computers and games of the eighties.

I don’t want to blame the victim here but this kind of feels like I am. It’s a huge goddamn mess that’s as much the fault of the companies running huge centralized app stores with moderation guidelines that are, in this case, way too loose. Or are exactly as loose as they can legally get away with; see the part where Google Play’s reaction to a game that was clearly a traceover of Unpacking was basically “we will do nothing, go get your own lawyers and fight it out in court”.

I would say maybe “lawyers” and “someone to hassle with takedown notices while Witch Beam gets on with their next game” is a thing their publisher should be doing, but they seem to be self-publishing. Which is a whole giant pile of stress that I’ve been through with comics, turns out publishers do a lot of boring bullshit for you that’s maybe worth their cut so you can get on with making the thing you’re good at making. Vlambeer hooked up with Devolver after Ridiculous Fishing, hopefully Witch Beam will find a similar indie-focused publisher to help with this stuff soon.

wly_cdgr2• 4 years ago

If you're afraid of clones, your game isn't good enough, simple as that

Nevermark3• 4 years ago

It isn't as simple as that.

New ideas that are valuable to the market are by definition worth rewarding so that more of them get created.

Some valuable ideas, however, have difficulty translating release into reward simply because despite their originality and value to society, they are easily copied.

This creates a problem for everyone. Something we all benefit from encouraging, and that pays for itself (in terms of value that it creates), is being disincentivized.

To overcome this hurdle, and achieve a higher economic maxima for both creators and consumers, we have limited (in scope and time) protections for different kinds of valuable but easily copied ideas: patents, trademarks, trade secret, and copyright.

Any situation where valuable creations are being disincentivized, is worth consideration of whether that situation could be changed to everyone's benefit.

jker• 4 years ago

Thank you for this. It’s helpful to have a rational, reasonable treatment of intellectual property protection that avoids both extremes of “all information wants to be free” and “piracy is theft.”

nekcihc5• 4 years ago

Mobile market has created wide access that was not something available to game devs in past - that's why there were game publishers. The speed of gaining market also is significantly faster. So, when devs complain about market speed slowing down - it is not because of clones.

Clones apparently are appealing to completelly different market segment, than what "original" aimed at. It is erroneous to assume, that it was their market in first place!

Ideas are sh!t and means nothing!

If you have an idea - that means, that someone else(in counts of 100s or 1000s) have the same idea already, or someone else in past had that idea. There has been examples of similar products developed independently at the same time, so they might have looked like clones but they are not always clones. So, claiming that ideas are unique and should be somewhat appropriately rewarded... phew!

I can relate to the frustrations that are described in article, but at the same time I can't understand if the people that complain have no brains, if they had not foreseen this outcome and did not calculated for how long they will get profit from their product - which was not forever in the first place!!!

PS If you are an indie developer, you should educate yourself at least in basic level of marketing, law and business. And after that decide if indie development is for you and if you have a killing insticts of a shark or you are going to be food.

nekcihc5• 4 years ago

Not a fan of Wordle type games, but seeing ads of Wordle, I would say that they are on their top wave and have even been mentioned in TV and the only thing that is left for them is going down - all the way down - their downfall has started and it is inevitable.

It is path of all the mobile games, because people are morons and their interest will peak on something else, so it is not clones that will be taking their popularity, but boredom of people.

Any mobile app has ~2 year lifetime on market, unless it is significantly updated and changed to the point, that it is not the same when it was released first.

Currently I am playing couple of 5 year old mobile games - one of them I am playing for 3 years and joined when it was in process of neglect. Another one I started to play 6 months ago and it was "dead" for past 3,5 years now, as it had no events and nothing new added - it was too expensive for a company to employ devs just to fix bugs!

Lifetime of Wordle will be under those 2 years, because it looks very simple concept and there is nothing that can improve it, so it is doomed for even shorter lifetime, than anything that was released before.

Mobile gaming is cancer - it is not clones that are killing successful games, but loss of interest in public, that has a short attention span.... oh look, a shiny thing, kthnxbye.

Over past 2 years I went through 10+ mobile games. They were all very beatufuly done and all of them stole my time and it took tremendous amount for me to get rid of them, because I got addicted to them, so pardon my cynic view on this, but I don't care at all for Wordle and the public free advertisement of another cancer game.

wly_cdgr2• 4 years ago

This is just noted sleazeball Rami Ismail and his insider indiedev buddies trying to protect their profits

shkkmo• 4 years ago

While I understand the pain of developers who get their projects cloned, I think bit is a bad idea to make the platforms the arbitrators of intellectual property, especially when it isn't clear what the legal decision would be. While there are complete ripoffs that should clearly be removed, there are also iterative clones that steal some ideas and improve on others. This iterative cloning process has lead to some of the best games ever made and we should be careful about limiting them.

If the indie developer's only reasonable recourse is to petition platforms, we need to reform the laws about to allow indie developer's a realistic and economically feasible route to address clones within the court system.

eezurr• 4 years ago

A part of me wishes for a video game crash to happen again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

But it wont, because most video games are no longer tied to physical products. It takes very little effort to purchase and delete video games now, and they take up 0 physical space. And, there isn't a new technology to replace the current mediums. They are also much cheaper compared to then.

It was an interesting time in video game history though because the video game market in 1983 became saturated with low quality games and clones because Atari did not enforce any control over 3rd party studios/publishers. People lost trust in product quality and stopped purchasing games. There was a 97% drop in revenue. !!! (not a typo)

Then Nintendo swooped in several years later and enforced quality control.

Recently I heard the Nintendo Switch is opening the doors to 3rd party developers. I think Unity already has a module for creating games for the switch, so the flood is coming, if it hasn't already.

My point is I'm sad to see everything go way of the internet. Procurement is dying and yet is necessary for quality. There's no enforcement in the Android store (and partially the the App Store) per the article. Steam opened its doors to everyone years ago and there are hundreds (or thousands?)* of new games added every day to steam. I believe they changed their algorithm to match games based on sales, not similarity (which makes sense, except my particular favorite genres don't have a lot of competition, so I really have to dig deep to find similar games).

Haha.. maybe I'm just getting old. I just dont want to have to put effort into finding quality products. It's such a waste of time to go pioneering.

Edit: *Correction, it's 100-200 a week, not per day.

telchior3• 4 years ago

There's undoubtedly a flood of trash. But lower barriers to building games isn't making the game industry worse.

Somewhat strained metaphor here, but think of energy. Cheap power generation helped the Industrial Revolution along and caused a ton of awful, smoke belching factories to pop up, and a lot of people hated that. But cheap electricity is also the bedrock of every innovation since (including the type HN likes).

Easier accessibility to whatever resource always generates crap, but that crap always contains a percentage of treasure. And there's a lot of really, really good stuff hidden away on Steam that wouldn't exist without the easier tools we have today.

RicoElectrico• 4 years ago

I always get a schadenfreude from creative destruction, but with the exception of Covid causing WFH to go mainstream there hasn't been any as of late. There's no bona-fide disruptive innovation today, only a race to the next big thing fueled by essentially free capital. A race in which it's more important to chase the rabbit rather than to catch it. Self driving cars, anyone? Metaverse?

cableshaft4• 4 years ago

Recently I heard the Nintendo Switch is opening the doors to 3rd party developers. I think Unity already has a module for creating games for the switch, so the flood is coming, if it hasn't already.

There's 4338 games on the Switch[1] and the eShop has terrible discoverability. The flood is already there.

For comparison, the Wii only had 1595 games released over its existence[2].

Admittedly nowhere near as bad as Steam though, which had 10,263 games released in 2020 alone[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wii_games

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-rele...

jonplackett6• 4 years ago

It’s not just games it’s everything.

I made (i think) the first automatic face swap app back in 2012 when face detection first appeared in iOS.

It did pretty well, got into the top 10 around the world. #1 for a bit. Made me some money.

But there were tonnes of copies. One guy even flew over to meet me first from SF and said he wanted to buy the app. Offered me half a million dollars. Then when I said yes cut it to half that after he spoke to ‘the board’. Then said half that again - at which point I told him to go F himself - he’d also added into the contract I had to take the app offline and send him the source code for them to review before finalising, which would have ruined the purely viral growth.

Within 2 weeks he had launched a virtually identical app - and I mean identical. Just a different name and icon. The entire UI was copied down to the smallest detail. So obviously he’d been working on it before I said no.

I think this was his plan all along. To copy my app and use the potential buy out as distraction / disruption.

He then sent me a really angry email with the choice line “if someone offer/ you a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat”.

orhmeh09• 4 years ago

I’m sorry he wasted your time, but I found this really funny. Thanks for sharing. What was the fate for either app?

jonplackett6• 4 years ago

I also find it pretty funny now! Very glad I didn’t get mixed up with him in the end! It makes a funny story at least

Mine is still online: facejuggler.com (though obviously very outdated now)

I’m not sure what happened to his and all the others. There are so many copies now it’s hard to know.

whiskyant• 4 years ago

“if someone offer/ you a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat”

That analogy only makes sense if he offered you equity, haha.

jonplackett6• 4 years ago

I know right? Such an idiotic person.

orbital-decay• 4 years ago

Was his clone successful, though?

jonplackett6• 4 years ago

It did OK. He had one of those businesses that other developers pay to be ‘featured’ for a day so had an easy way to slot his own apps in there and give them exposure. Ultimately mine won out I think. Can’t see his online anymore. I guess copying other people’s ideas can only get you so far (unless you’re Facebook…)

mandeepj2• 4 years ago

I think he deserves to be name shamed here

jonplackett6• 4 years ago

He probably does, but I’m too classy…

michaelmrose4• 4 years ago

I sympathize with how you feel and if it was the case that they literally took the code or images you created you would have at least an argument but I don't think that there is any reason to allow anyone to own a particular arrangement of icons or the idea of how to do something.

Giving such ownership makes the entire human race poorer and doing so to protect entertainment is really weakens the justification further.

jonplackett6• 4 years ago

I don’t disagree. I just think people who do it are still assholes.

m0llusk• 4 years ago

With a pay to release model only previews are initially available and only when enough money is pledged for release is the full product made available. This is not a trivial model to adopt, but it holds promise for doing business without being at the mercy of copies.

There are also many ways of adding value and capturing customer attentions. Community support and forums where people can find and share tutorials and extensions and come together for conversation and shared game play can add a great deal and keep customers coming to producers for more. This is especially true if there are ways of voting or making purchases that direct the course of ongoing development. Currently management of customer relations and engagement is not integrated with the development and vending of most games. Sure there is some marketing and promotions, but full community support and development is more than that.

It may seem that being able to lock down so called intellectual property extends value for creators and thus the larger community, but there is also an argument to be made that all this focus on ownership and protection of ideas dulls and slows down every aspect of development.

baud1472582• 4 years ago

well, the lesson here seems to be to avoid targeting mobile platforms. And even then if your game is so simple it can be cloned even before release, maybe it's just there's an oversupply of game/gamedevs and the market will correct itself (or not and artists will continue to produce art, even at a loss)

brandonmenc• 4 years ago

Games are now like music.

Selling music is a ship that has sailed. Decades ago. It seems the same thing is happening to - among other things - indie games

Maybe you can get some donations, but that's about it. That's just the way it is now.

It's still a million times better than the shareware days though.

Back then, someone developing a passion project game could never dream of being able to reach a global audience and also take no-cost friction-free global payments from them. For every Apogee there were many orders of magnitude more developers who would have loved to pocket even a thousand dollars with their game.

As with music, there is this imo strange idea among niche independent creators that they should be able to just get paid like a Hollywood star for making something that lots of other people are making.

Do it because you enjoy it and be happy when you can collect four or five digits of cash, because the alternative is zero audience and zero money. And it always has been.

the_af4• 4 years ago

I understand this is demoralizing and infuriating for indie devs. And indie devs are the kind of devs I want to support, so I really side with them.

That said, for me this is the real insight (said by a dev from Vlambeer):

"Ultimately, the big question is: what can you do to combat clones? And in reality there's not a whole lot you can do. Or what you can do could legally jeopardise how game development works for future generations."
"If flying in a game was protected, then Luftrausers wouldn't exist"

Ultimately almost every act of creativity has some core of... let's not call it stealing, let's call it "creative borrowing without asking for permission". That's how it works, authors take from what has come before.

If, trying to protect indie devs from annoying copycats, we end up enforcing a draconian system, only lawyers will be happy.

hypertele-Xii2• 4 years ago

Ultimately, the big question is: what can you do to combat clones? And in reality there's not a whole lot you can do.

Of course there is. Get good. Make better games. It matters not if someone else reimplements your idea with inferior execution. If you're better at it than they are, your game is the better "clone" and celebrated for it.

Even better: Make something so crazy that nobody can successfully copy it even it they try, because they can't figure out what makes it work.

cableshaft4• 4 years ago

Of course there is. Get good. Make better games.

That was kind of the article's point. If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours). Especially if you haven't released on all platforms right away, which is extremely difficult to pull off.

And if you market it at all, there could be clones out there before your game is even finished and out there, because you're busy trying to make something good and they're just rushing to get something that looks like the screenshot out there as soon as possible.

Even better: Make something so crazy that nobody can successfully copy it even it they try, because they can't figure out what makes it work.

So spend 7 years working full-time with employees using money made from a previously successful game to make something like The Witness. Got it.

Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that.

hypertele-Xii2• 4 years ago

If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours).

Name it the same as an internet domain you control. Now you hold the keys to the name.

Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that.

In other words, a fantastic niche to those who can.

TillE• 4 years ago

If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly

How? How on earth are you going to clone a game like Stardew Valley, or Disco Elysium, or Factorio, or No Man's Sky, or Subnautica, or etc etc etc of actual good PC indie games? You're not, not without an enormous amount of effort.

This stuff pretty much only happens to very simple mobile games. When you're talking about actual meaty games, crappy clones are very easily recognized as such.

motoxpro• 4 years ago

I feel like games are more similar to music in this sense. It's relatively easy to copy but extremely hard to create fresh. Think The Beatles for music. Complexity != quality.

scotty79• 4 years ago

Stores should just group games by similarity and order them by date in search results.

Clone culture and its continuous impact on indie developers

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