[HN Gopher] Clone culture and its continuous impact on indie dev...
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Clone culture and its continuous impact on indie developers
Author : amichail
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-02-19 14:13 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamesindustry.biz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamesindustry.biz)
| quadcore wrote:
| 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.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| 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.
| quadcore wrote:
| 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.
| cma wrote:
| Do you think Jenova Chen was just lucky with Journey's
| success?
| quadcore wrote:
| Disclaimer Ive seen a little bit the game, I dont know
| the extent of its success.
|
| 1) most likely, just look at his success rate in terms of
| how many of his games did succeed.
|
| 2) now the definition of success. if he took 5 years to
| develop the game, he has to net a very (very) minimum of
| 20 millions to start becoming successful. Remember, you
| can't just pay one salary developing software, you have
| to cover: salaries (top engineers and top artists) + (the
| most important) investment for the next games + bad years
| + grow you company (that's the point of a company) +
| hardware + R&D to stay at the top of your game +
| retirement money because you cant do this after 38. 20
| millions net is a very optimistic number, I wouldn't be
| happy with that, I would be happy with netting 50.
|
| Did he net 50 millions? If yes, then yes he was
| _starting_ to become successful. If he did this 3 games
| in a row, now he wasnt lucky.
|
| Now dont get me wrong, this game is a wondeful piece of
| art, but it's likely not a succesful company.
| enkid wrote:
| This is not true for me. I think I buy more games than I
| watch movies at this point. Movies of the games are under
| ten dollars because I pick them up on sale, then I spend a
| couple hours on them and feel fine with it, because it
| wasn't very expensive. Based on the front page of Steam, I
| don't think I'm the only one. I have a couple I keep going
| back to, but probably on average, I spend about ten hours
| on each game I purchase, and I would guess I'm not the I
| only one.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| What is your source for that? Games are different, f2p
| mobile games are an equivalent of slot machines working on
| pure addiction, for some indie games you pay for a short
| unique experience, there high budget single player games
| where they have a campaign you play and that's it.
| [deleted]
| Ygg2 wrote:
| 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.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > 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.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > But then you lose the players that value immersion
|
| Depends on player, but to me all MMORPGs feel less like an
| environment and more off an Amusement parks.
|
| Because events in them are designer driven and not player
| driven. Could players cause Cataclysm or liberate a city
| for a day or a month? No. Because designers want to appease
| a mass of players, they make events repeatable, which
| cheapens the significance of event (you get an achievement,
| and you get an achievement).
|
| Compare this to something 2D but more systemic like SS13,
| where unintentional actions of a single individual e.g. a
| clown puting a bag of holding in another bag of holding can
| completely change the round. I.e. spawn a life-threatening
| singularity that might destroy the station.
|
| Or hell a sabotage by a spy might have side effects. Lets
| say a spy trying to cause a blackout to eliminate his
| target unintentionally unleashes a horde of monkeys,
| infected by the furry virus, from captivity. Monkeys in
| turn unleash a dangerous space kudzu which results in
| station being plagued by both a literal furry plague, a
| bunch of violent apes and a sentient and malevolent plant.
| ouid wrote:
| 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.
| neild wrote:
| World of Warcraft at launch had relatively low polygon
| count models and worked flawlessly on low-spec graphics
| hardware, but the animation was spectacular and miles
| beyond what any of its competition was doing. The feet of a
| moving model actually touched the ground as if it were a
| solid object; literally every other MMO I played from that
| era had models where the run or walk animation was
| completely decoupled from movement speed, with feet sliding
| around disconnected from the ground.
|
| In addition, WoW had coherent and consistent art direction
| with characters, enemies, and environments all feeling like
| part of a thematic whole.
|
| Blizzard had clearly spent ridiculous amounts of time and
| money on the visuals of the game, the animation in
| particular. They just did it while targeting low-spec
| hardware to avoid limiting their audience.
|
| There's a very big difference between cheap for the game
| developer to make, and supporting cheap hardware.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jonplackett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm sorry he wasted your time, but I found this really funny.
| Thanks for sharing. What was the fate for either app?
| m0llusk wrote:
| 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.
| pyb wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| all these companies are going to die as soon as they run
| out of VC-money or can't sustain the growth to get new
| money
|
| VC-startups are glorified MLMs for early employees and
| investors
| ewired wrote:
| Those are all okay because they don't use an openly
| replicated linked list with byzantine fault tolerance.
| The ones using an openly replicated linked list with
| byzantine fault tolerance are the only ones that should
| be subject to scrutiny and public fits of outrage. If
| they are using PostgreSQL on AWS, there is no issue.
| ehnto wrote:
| 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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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.
| telchior wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| pengaru wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| > 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| > 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_af wrote:
| > _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?
| Nevermark wrote:
| A patent protects a means of doing something. It doesn't
| protect the final form.
|
| In this case "concept" has a specific meaning. Not just an
| "idea", which obviously is not copyrightable. But the
| general structure of a creative work from the consumers
| experience.
|
| For instance, rewriting a novel with new names, new
| locations, swapping out details not necessary for the plot
| with equivalent supporting details, etc.
|
| IANAL, so I have no idea what the legalities of
| copyrighting a "concept" are. But that is what is meant by
| the concept of a creative work. It is the core of the
| creative work, and creative works are what copyright was
| intended to protect/incentivize.
| the_af wrote:
| From what I can understand of Wikipedia's summary of the
| Tetris Holdings vs Xio case, the copyright was about
| "look and feel". The judge reiterated that gameplay
| cannot be copyrighted, which was also my understanding,
| but _content_ (art, style, etc) can. There was also
| something called "trade dress" which seems to relate to
| the confusion in customer's minds about which game is
| which.
|
| (English is my second language and legalese is my I-dont-
| understand-it-at-all language, so things like "trade
| dress" sound meaningless to me. But it's definitely not
| copyright of gameplay elements!)
|
| > _For instance, rewriting a novel with new names, new
| locations, swapping out details not necessary for the
| plot with equivalent supporting details, etc._
|
| If you copy and distribute a novel/script, or parts of
| it, then surely that is copyright infringement. But if
| you "steal" the idea and change enough details that it's
| not the same thing anymore (i.e. you cannot point at
| chunks of the clone and claim "this is lifted almost
| verbatim from the original"), my bet is that it's either
| entirely legal (nothing you can do about it) or a form of
| fraud unrelated to copyright. Isn't copyright about
| copying/distributing the original work, or parts of it?
| If you make a clone that is similar but different, then
| surely that's not copyright infringement?
| CJefferson wrote:
| 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.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| 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.
| wincy wrote:
| 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.
| baud147258 wrote:
| also I don't think Stardew Valley had any competition on PC
| when it was released (barring emulation of the Harvest Moon
| games), which would have helped making it a very good
| success
| city41 wrote:
| Are there any other examples of successful games made by
| one person? I was going to say Fez, but two people created
| it. Successful single dev games are exceptionally rare
| dgant wrote:
| Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both by Lucas
| Pope.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Depends on how tightly you are applying that definition.
| Nothing exists in a vacuum. Games will pretty much always
| use something created by someone else.
|
| For example: If I pay an artist to do most of the art for
| my game, did I still make it by myself? What if I pay for
| music? What about the engine?
|
| Here's some highly successful games that one might argue
| were created by one person (to varying degrees):
|
| - Minecraft
|
| - Dwarf Fortress
|
| - Kenshi
|
| - Banished
|
| On top of those there's probably an endless list of
| successful browser and flash games.
| umvi wrote:
| Undertale, Cave Story
| adenozine wrote:
| Minecraft, in the early days.
|
| I think single-dev games start, similarly to startups,
| and gradually pick up small teams as they go. Minecraft
| fits that bill to a tee, I'm sure there are younger, more
| informed people here who could point to other examples.
|
| The totality of direction that one solo person has over a
| project isn't actually all that important, in reality.
| Having one or two or three team members to rely on,
| delegate to, bounce ideas off, is way more effective
| towards getting things done, and especially on a
| schedule.
| ido wrote:
| Yeah there are a bunch of 1 person (or more useful, less
| than 5 people) teams who find a good amount of success
| still.
|
| I personally prefer "band-sized" teams (mid single-digit)
| over solo, I find it a lot easier to stay motivated and
| easier to achieve high productivity due to more chances
| for specializations while still being small enough to
| maintain an "indie feel".
|
| I believe supercell (hardly an indie) maintain game teams
| at around 8 during dev and increase up to 17 when live,
| which is also sorta similar to the size you see in indie
| teams(f2p/GaaS need a lot more manpower for liveops).
| They just have a lot of such teams.
| telchior wrote:
| Depends on your definition of success. Personally, I
| think if the developer is making hundreds of thousands to
| millions of dollars, that's a yes; but I've met people
| who think if the game isn't a household name, it's not
| really successful.
|
| Anyway, most people have this mental model of the video
| game industry where there's a measurable, comprehensible
| number of games, but the actual volume of released games
| is insane.
|
| Anecdotally, one of the most impressive devs I've ever
| talked with had a full time day job and did solo dev on
| mobile games on the side. He released 3-4 games within 2
| years, 2016-2018 and they all earned around $200k+. But
| again, you never would have heard of any of these games,
| just like you don't hear about whatever current
| hypercasual game has 20 million players (unless you're an
| addict or monitor App Annie / Steamcharts / whatever else
| on a daily basis).
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| There is also the HUGE TouHou bullet hell franchise, more
| or less completely made by ZUN if I recall.
|
| The fan culture around it is even bigger though.
| baud147258 wrote:
| 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)
| TrianguloY wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why would the music and style be treated as more special than
| the concept of the game ?
| krapp wrote:
| Assets and production are what differentiate one game from
| another. "Concept" more often than not is just a genre
| marker.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| >For example you probably wouldn't say that Crash
| bandicot[sic] is a clone of Mario Bros, even though both
| are 2d platformers.
|
| Ehm, I don't know whether this supports or hurts your
| argument, but Crash Bandicoot is 3d (or at least 2.5d) and
| has an entirely different type of gameplay than either the
| 2d or the 3d Mario games.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| You're right, I was thinking of the 2d sections, but even
| those are, as you say, 2.5D.
|
| Maybe Megaman is a better example?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Yeah, I suppose that works. It is 2d, but has such vastly
| different game mechanics that no one would argue it's a
| clone.
| airpoint wrote:
| Good counterweight article to the one posted here the other day
| where somebody was whining about how "Apple hates developers"
| because their Wordle clone was rejected from the App Store smh
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30372594
| shkkmo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| 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?
| telchior wrote:
| 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.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| If you're afraid of clones, your game isn't good enough, simple
| as that
| Nevermark wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| This is just noted sleazeball Rami Ismail and his insider
| indiedev buddies trying to protect their profits
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
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