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> 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?

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.

I wasn't arguing for game mechanic patents, I was using the existence of patents as evidence that we've recognized the problem of "person A invests massively in researching something new, person B just copies them and wins in the market" and tried to solve it.

Indeed, copyright and licensing are similar attempts to solve this problem. Indie devs tend to lack the resources to litigate with cloners, though.

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.

From your original post:

> 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?

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

I should've known better than to mention the p-word on HN. See my reply to a sibling comment for why I brought them up.

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.

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.

"After graduating from the University of Washington in Tacoma with a degree in computer science, Barone could not bring himself to pursue a job at Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Instead, he took a part-time job at a Seattle theater and spent the rest of his time building a video game. He was living in his parent’s basement. Some weeks, he’d spend as much as 60 hours working on the game.

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...

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

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).

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.

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.

Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both by Lucas Pope.

How about Omno? https://store.steampowered.com/app/969760/Omno/

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...

I guess the obvious killer in this category would be Flappy Bird, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird made in two to three days.

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.

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.

"Axiom Verge" comes to mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_Verge

Undertale, Cave Story

Spiderweb Software

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

Same with the Playstation, Xbox, and Switch ports. The Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons series had both been releasing only handheld titles for a while at that point, and didn't move back to home consoles until after Stardew blew up.

I just got a Retropie and the description it has for the Harvest Moon 64 rom plot and gameplay could be written on the back of a Stardew Valley box and I wouldn’t notice. It’s basically the ultimate fan game, that also managed to surpass its inspiration.

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.

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.

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...

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.

> I don't want federal judges declaring that Torchlight is illegal because it's too close to Diablo.

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.

Well lets start with the fact that you have no moral right to keep people from making any work they please with their own time and materials. No sane argument in favor of using the government to restrict citizens freedoms begins with "why the fuck not".

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, 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.

The number of game developers and studios is more or less fixed for a certain period of time. Since returns on games are so low, game creators have to save money on development. The easiest way to save money on development is to make a clone. So there will be a higher percentage of clones during periods of oversupply. (Nothing empirically measured but this mechanic makes sense to me).

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.

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.

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.

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.

> DOOM clones was a thing of past.

Very few of them were any good, though. Does anyone remember any of them other than Dark Forces, Marathon, and Duke 3D?

Yes. The same is about these mobile game clones - the ones that will be better than original(on something), will last longer. The bigger issue is that mobile market is way faster and attention span of newer generation is also shorter, so everything is not as dramatic picture, as this article is painting. Also, I can only see this article as free advertisment to Wordle - on top of the mobile ads, that they have spammed and they much better than the "useful idiots" understand, that their time for Wordle is limited.

I absolutely loved Duke 3D. The tools to make levels were ridiculously good for the time and the multiplayer death match was fantastic. Come on who doesn't love shrinking down their opponent to mouse size then chasing them down and stepping on them.

It really depends on how you define "clone" in this context. But let's say Heretic/Hexen, Strife, Blood, Shadow Warrior...

What did Zynga do better when they cloned FarmVille?

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

As someone who is making food at home and do not visit restaurants(because I have seen other side - how the food is made), I can only see Cronut as a brand development and advertisment of a donut(which is terrible food IMO). People in NYC are probably very bored(just like I am with my food scene here - that's another reason why I am preparing my own food) - that's why they were excited for new thing.

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...

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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?

I agree that swapping out enough details will eventually avoid copyright infringement, but its possible to swap out low-level specifics and still be so obviously a structural and topical "copy" that someone can get into trouble.

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...

Don't worry, "trade dress" is pretty meaningless to the casual native English speaker too, it is a technical legal term that doesn't really mean anything more in day to day English to anyone else than it does to you. (My guess is it may have meant more to an English speaker in the 18th century or something!)

and thanks for the very good explanation.

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.

No, this is explicitly incorrect. If you try to write a clone of Tetris and word gets around to Pajitnov and Henk, you'll be sued. Copyrights and trademarks protect all aspects of Tetris's design, including the dimensions of the playboard, the tetromino shapes, the next piece indicator, the fall rate and animations, and the overall look and feel of the game. (See Tetris Holdings v. Xio, YES THIS IS COPYRIGHTABLE.) The Tetris Company applied for, and vigorously defends, ALL of these copyrights and trademarks.

If you are not a licensee of Tetris Holdings, DO NOT, EVER, develop a Tetris clone. You face legal liability if you do.

2048 needed better lawyers

> 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.