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Comment by jefe78 | Hacker News Reader

A ripped off version seems more appropriate. This seems...well, criminal.

I love Minecraft. I hope Notch does something to stop this. I'd love to see Minecraft on the Xbox, but not if it means stealing someone else's idea.

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Ah, quit being such a winklevoss. We win when there's competition of implementations.

We win when game developers build off each other's ideas, even making an improved version of what came before, but direct clones serve only to reduce the reward for innovators, so I strongly disagree that it's a win for the market place. Look at casual games for an example of a market that basically crashed when developers started spending all their energy cloning successful titles instead of trying to create something fresh.

As a personal example, search for Robokill in this game's release forum post:

https://www.mochimedia.com/community/forum/topic/game-showca...

I'm not bitter - Robokill did well and I'd be surprised if they made even 5% as much as I did - but it's hard to argue that the market place is better off because this game exists. Robokill itself is not in any way original - it's basically a mixture of Smash TV and Diablo - but I think it was a fresh enough take on existing genres to earn its place in the market.

As long as this Minecraft inspired title tries to be different in some way, though, I have no problem with it.

You could argue that Minecraft created a new game genre, and that this game is simply part of that genre. Obviously I think they should've tried a little harder to create something unique (or at least more visually unique), but whatever. I think we will see a lot more of these survival/world building games.

The idea for Minecraft came from Infiniminer.

The Word of Notch - The origins of Minecraft: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecr...

To be fair, though, Infiniminer has extremely little in common with Minecraft. There are some superficial similarities [0] but it is a completely different (combat based) game.

I still think that clones are perfectly alright, even good, for everyone.

[0] The world is made of destroyable blocks and has low-res, non-aliased textures. That’s about it.

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