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Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

We don't.

Prior to LLMs there was some minimal effort required to snipe someone and possibly your reputation was attached otherwise there would have been no point in publishing to begin with.

Now anyone with a few dollars can do it, many who don't have a reputation to worry about.

It's the same problem as YouTube AI slop, AI-generated music, and everything else. Don't you dare tweet or blog about a video idea or hum a few bars from a song - within an hour 27 people will have posted AI slop rip-offs. There's something uniquely depressing about being beaten to the punch by a thief that doesn't deliver the same soul-crushing impact as having someone copy you after the fact.

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Definitly seeing this with video games. Especially ones that are easy to make and have generic names. I mean you could already easily clone those before, but now 10 people will easily clone them.

See this amusing reddit post. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1wfl64l/game_went...

I think making these type of games simply becomes an unviable source of income in the current era.

I'm sure there's a named concept for this: the idea of the game is its selling point, and has to be revealed to consumers to market itself. But the market has low friction (via Steam distribution, and by copies being cheap to make w/ LLMs), so you can't reliably establish your product before masses take over, especially if you don't have reputation built up from previous games.

You have to be bringing in something else for this not to happen, trade secrets not present to the consumer being one such factor.

You could patent your game design, if that's possible. This is exactly what patents were created for. But you yourself are probably churning out original (instead of copycat) little games and can't afford to patent all of them.

I don't belive you can patent gameplay. You can't say "I'm going to patent the idea that you all go around a board buying land and getting cash, if your player moves to someone else's land they have to pay them rent."

But you can copyright the artistic aspects of your game, like you can have the copyright to MONOPOLY and trademark the logo.

If you could patent gameplay there would be only 1 pong, which is a pretty basic idea. There are probably hundreds of pongs though.

There would only be one pong... for five years after the invention of pong. Then it would be free-for-all.

For those blocked by Reddit:

It's a screenshot of a list of games on Steam. Half of them are called "Needle in a Haystack" and the rest are variations. The title says the game went viral a week ago and the original creator had to put "(original)" in the title.

Copycats and rip-offs are really fast. Recently outbid.lol was the target.

I wonder how many fields will have to suffer through their collective work being sloppily copied or used as a basis for generative slop before we figure out we aren't getting AGI just Artificial General Slop.

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