King.com, makers of Candy Crush Saga – Trademark Trolls with a Double Standard?

Welcome to the games industry of today. It's all about this everywhere you look; in fact, if you are an indie doing games today and you don't build around monetization you'll pretty much be laughed at (not by the players evidently, but you get the point).

> Smartphones are powerful now, yet games that manage to match the quality and depth of an SNES-era game are basically non-existent

Well, people generally tend to have much shorter sessions with their smartphone than with a console. Stupid and simple works because that's where the demand is, so folks build more of it.

It's important to realize that our tastes aren't necessarily representative of people's tastes in general. Most people probably wouldn't enjoy Chrono Trigger or FF3 compared to Candy Crush. The evidence is that Final Fantasy games have been available for smartphones for a long time now, but they just aren't selling. The storytelling experience is the same, but people aren't as into them.

It's easy to label the industry as "low confidence" but reality is more along the lines of "acts on hard data." It's wise to be cautious when it only takes one or two mistakes to kill your company.

A few powerful companies are exploiting the current casual/F2P gold rush, but I doubt humanity as a whole will be into casual scam games forever. Games are evidently growing up. And legislators might eventually tackle games that focus on addicting and deceiving.

All this will take time of course, but I still don't think we're in for a cultural wasteland in the near-term. Indies are already filling the gap, and it actually leads to success for some of them. Most in my circles don't focus on making money first and foremost, neither do I.

The last mobile game I worked on at a (now defunct) company, started out as an innovative open-world exploration / action game (See http://www.slantsixgames.com/games/strata-scavenger). I can honestly say, having had first-hand gameplay experience with it, that this game could have been a standout in the mobile game crowd.

Unfortunately, the day came when our CMF (Canadian Media Fund) money ran out, and the company had to look for external funding. Needless to say, publishers are not interested in this kind of game. They expect simple gameplay, in-app purchases, social features, etc. It it very hard, in the current mobile game climate, to come up with truly deep and innovative games. I applaud each and every indie dev trying to do so.

EDIT: edited link above to point directly to the company's website

And so we are left with the old card & puzzle games.

There is also room for some great RTS but we have to wait til the tablet market becomes a little bit bigger.

'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic' for iOS being a notable exception, of course.

King and their ilk aren't cutting into that, they're innovating games for people who previously didn't play them. It's a positive thing.

[1] Pocket Tactics - http://www.pockettactics.com - is a very good site, in the style of Rock Paper Shotgun, for discovering the more interesting mobile games.

Their best of 2013 list is a good place to get started if you have no idea of what's available - http://www.pockettactics.com/pocket-tactics-best-2013-awards...

In the meantime, the PC master race is having a renaissance of sorts and the new batch of consoles look pretty good.

So much effort has been made to streamline our lives and make every task as efficient as possible (if not eliminate it all together). We then suddenly find ourselves so bored that we have to fill it with hours of brainless smartphone games and low-quality television. We'll call it entertainment!

This is great.

> Maybe it was always like so, and I was young and having too much fun to realize.

No, I don't think so. One way to look at it: previous generations of game companies were playing a cooperative, positive-sum game with their audience. By creating lots of fun and value, they could get high dollar-scores. Now, they are playing negative-sum games with the audience: by creating stress, compulsion, and addiction, they can extract money.

If you haven't read it, you might like the book "Finite and Infinite Games". It's not about games in the sense we're discussing here; it's more looking at social philosophy through the lens of games.

edit: nvm, apparently it's called Candy Crush Saga, so this is a silly comment..

The "candy" trademark is pretty insane though. I expect it will be challenged. Disney must surely have the Candy King in their Wreck It Ralph games.

Firms don't aggressively protect their IP out of some sense of global justice, they do it to make money. These firms understand the value of IP and the legal mechanisms that exist to protect/acquire/monetize it better than the average. Why would they hesitate to use this knowledge offensively?

Is it that surprising to see someone plagiarize tons of games, and then later try to claim ownership of those ideas? That's just a straight-up criminal in disguise as a game developer. If they weren't making games, they would be robbing people on the street. That's just who those people are.

Of course it's all bolstered by investors who have never played a single game in their life and believe that these are good investments and will write tons and tons of articles about it. They're not. Any real gamer would have told you Zynga wasn't a good investment at IPO.

It's like the Batman movies by different directors. It's the same basic concept but others are still better and more enjoyable than the rest.

Zinga made a lot of money for its owners and investors before imploding.

I'm not particularly fond of micro-transactions, I cannot stand the way intellectual property is handled in this country (US), and I dislike rip-off artists such as Zynga/King.

However, all King is doing here is playing ball with current IP legislation, protecting whatever trademarks they can. There's hundreds of games that are exactly the same in every category of gaming, just because King has the capability to create a high-quality successful series of mobile games (which are based off of extremely common gaming concepts) does not mean they are horrible people.

People get up in arms when these large corporations sue eachother over intellectual property. Why does the HN community have this double standard whenever a "little guy" can be made out to have been harmed? Just because you're the first person to think of a popular idea doesn't mean you own it forever.

Patent/Trademark/Copyright legislation is very clearly all bunk in the age of the internet. Get mad at the stupid laws, not at the people taking advantage of them.

This list is not to demean Rovio. I really like Rovio's execution and I keep playing Angry Birds and mostly Juice Cubes before going to bed. It's nice and relaxing.

And they have only the most minimal inclusion of the In-App-Purchase crap. They don't make cash-driven Skinner boxes.

People bag on Rovio because they were the first big smash hit of the mobile world, not for any good reason.

1) I wouldn't say "from being short...", I think it's more accurate to say "from JUST short...". My reasoning here is that we have deeper long games, heck Knights of the Old Republic comes to mind, and short fun games like Cut The Rope.

2) Couldn't you say basically the same thing about the movie industry, regarding the lack of new ideas and abundant cloning? When games and movies take so much investment, it's not always easy to convince barely imaginative accountants to spend the money.

Pepsi can mention Coca Cola in their ads, they can sing and dance about them if they want to. As soon as they put it on their packets (or use other trademarks like the Coca Cola livery) and create the possibility of confusion in consumers as to whether Coca Cola made the Pepsi product or not [at least enough to convince a court] then they're in trouble and Coca Cola should be able to successfully sue.

This is a large company realising that their smaller competition doesn't want to sell - and reacting by cloning the game and trying to push it to market before the smaller company can get it out there.

It's just Zynga all over again.