Clone culture and its continuous impact on indie developers
gamesindustry.biz
gamesindustry.biz
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”.
Mine is still online: facejuggler.com (though obviously very outdated now)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.
That analogy only makes sense if he offered you equity, haha.
Giving such ownership makes the entire human race poorer and doing so to protect entertainment is really weakens the justification further.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The fan culture around it is even bigger though.
Way to the Woods is another example, and the solo dev built it as a teenager! https://junkee.com/way-to-the-woods-e3/210743
Ghost Knight also looks promising (still in progress): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1374810/Ghost_Knight_A_Da...
Barone eventually moved in with his girlfriend, Amber Hageman, who paid most of the bills. Barone stuck with his plan. He learned to put on a mask of confidence for friends and family. He knew that if he game wasn’t a success, he’d squander the trust and hope his loved ones placed in his dream."[1]
So he relied on first his parents, and then his girlfriend, to heavily subsidize him for 4 years. It ended up paying off in this instance, of course, but most people don't have this luxury.
And it doesn't always pay off, either. I've seen firsthand many a game that seemed like it would be a success fail once it hit the market.
[1]: https://www.knkx.org/other-news/2017-03-25/this-man-committe...
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.
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?
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.
(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?
and thanks for the very good explanation.
For instance, movies that were too similar to predecessors have been found to be infringing.
Example: Universal/Jaws vs. Great White.
https://screenrant.com/jaws-movie-universal-canceled-italian...
If you are not a licensee of Tetris Holdings, DO NOT, EVER, develop a Tetris clone. You face legal liability if you do.
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...
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.
Shouldn't the abundance of clones naturally cease in an oversupply scenario, since they'd be unable to garner any returns? I'm no economist, but it doesn't seem to make business sense.
Perhaps what's really going on is the act of creating and shipping low-effort clones has become a game unto itself. That doesn't have to be profitable for the "creators"; they're being entertained and paying app store fees so Valve is still happy selling proverbial shovels.
It would be a jury and a judge who agrees that they are too similar. And why the fuck not? It's the same system that keeps me from debuting my new book and movie "SandHill" a sci-fi story about a bunch of sand worms and spice or my new hit song "Elder Rural Highway" under my country/rap name "Smaller Nos Y".
For some reason, writing, music, movies, TV and even boat designs are all granted copyrights. But we have yet to extend the same practice to game designs.
The argument to make for example distributing Harry Potter epubs to your million closest friends is that its vastly easier to transmit a few MB than it is to sit down and write the thing and fewer people might write if they had to compete with people spending 1/100th of a cent in electricity vs their months or years of work.
It's not remotely clear that the same argument holds for the game industry. We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of tools/distribution/games and its not clear that Torchlight for example is as good or better replacement for Diablo unless they just do it better.
The tools you suggest we create would overwhelmingly be used in favor of those who can afford all the lawyers not to protect indie developers and the entire world of art is so very very derivative that in 10 years no game would be created without the largess of a tiny number of owners whose undeserving great grandkids would inherit the rights to the entire industry or whatever is left of it after you assassinated it.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Very few of them were any good, though. Does anyone remember any of them other than Dark Forces, Marathon, and Duke 3D?
Tiramisu is an awesome cake from a small mom+pop cafe in Italy, California rolls for sushi, etc...
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.
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.
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?
Indeed, copyright and licensing are similar attempts to solve this problem. Indie devs tend to lack the resources to litigate with cloners, though.
> 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.
> wholesale theft of art assets
Curious what you think the difference is?
Music, sounds, and other art assets are trivially copied but you don't seem to be OK with that.
What's different to you about the specific combination of numbers that makes Mario's movement fun vs. the specific combination of 3 notes and rhythm that makes the bassline from Psycho Killer catchy?
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.
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.
I don't think you ca boil it to some formula like success rate. Journey got funding partly from the big critical success of some of those earlier ones.
OMG... No. The point of the company is to provide satisfactory profits to the owners. In case of many smaller companies, the point is not even that, but instead "to provide a place of work for owners where they can work on their own stuff and on their own terms".
Plenty of people don't care about infinite growth. People are not bacteria.
I would definitely not expect a game designer to target for this type of audience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe Megaman is a better example?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
VC-startups are glorified MLMs for early employees and investors
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stardew Valley clones: https://gamerant.com/stardew-valley-clone-harvest-life-super...
Factorio has a bunch of games that if not clones, are pretty damn similar to Factorio. I'm playing one right now called Dyson Sphere Program, but there's Satisfactory, Mindustry, Automation Empire, Shapez.io, FactoryIdle.com, and here's one on iOS in particular (since we're talking about mobile games) called Builderment: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/builderment/id1558592038
Subnautica: https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/141925/subnautic... Hell, people claiming No Man's Sky's new content update being heavily inspired by Subnautica: https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/155102/no-mans-s...
No Man's Sky already has a bunch of similar games that predates it on a bit smaller scale, but here's one I found that looks heavily inspired by it: https://steamcommunity.com/app/275850/discussions/0/41244629...
Disco Elysium is so heavily narrative driven it's not a good candidate for a clone, sure, and also it's not the sort of game that would appeal to a casual app crowd, so it's not a good candidate for being cloned anyway. I guess you found one!
I'm not saying there's nothing out there that can't be cloned, obviously a couple of guys at a clone studio aren't going to crank out a game in a couple of months that has the borderline AAA production values of No Man's Sky. But the point is, neither can most indie developers make those games in the first place either, especially not those that haven't already had a previously (and usually much smaller) successful game first.
Hell, Hello Games couldn't even make No Man's Sky (at least not the first time around, took several years and many apologies to buyers before it finally got to its original vision).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.