“1024,” “2048″ And Other Copies Of Popular Paid Game “Threes” Fill App Stores | Hacker News Reader

“1024,” “2048″ And Other Copies Of Popular Paid Game “Threes” Fill App Stores

techcrunch.com

39 pointsychw44 comments

I have not played 1024; but, I will say the mechanic of 2048 is very different from Threes: it would be like saying that Bejeweled is a "clone" of Tetris Attack, that Sonic the Hedgehog is a "clone" of Super Mario Brothers, or that Flappy Bird is a "clone" of Lunar Lander. These games all have many superficial similarities, and even share similar control mechanics, but they are in fact very very different to people playing the games: the strategies are different, the tactics are different, and someone could easily find one "incredibly fun" and the other "intensely boring".

Yeah, I agree.

From the article:

"currently, there’s only one “Flappy Bird” knock-off in the top 20 on the iTunes App Store"

Hard to take an article seriously when it unironically and somewhat derisively references Flappy Bird knock-offs considering Flappy Bird itself is a pretty direct knock-off of Piou Piou:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.pioupiou&h...

Which itself is more arguably a knock-off of Helicopter Game, which is a dumbed down 1 button linear-rails horizontal version of Lunar Lander... and so on.

I believe PiouPiou (the app and the website they put up) was released in February 2014 and their story of being ripped off by Flappy Bird is just a shameless lie for people who don't check dates.

If that's true they also either hacked YouTube or created a time machine so they could go back to 2010 and post this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpxmqejpR0Q

I’ve worked for one of the developers of Piou-Piou. The game was released in 2010, didn’t meet much success at the time, and like a handful of games from the same group was discontinued. The recent video was published after heated discussion on how Flappy Bird ripped them off (during which I wrote to them it was unlikely -- not sure they agree, to this day).

They also made a handful of games that were successful, several that went through very public controversy about being copied from someone else; several that have been stolen quite blatantly (with the original developers nicknames in the function calls). That cycle hasn't stopped there: reverse-engineered a game for cheap, etc. I won’t give details because I don’t like talking to lawyers, but all was as transparent as those things can be.

I’ll say here what I said then: if someone steals from you, there's always a slight difference that could be an improvement, take that; otherwise, every game has its own history. Learn and let it be.

I've lost count of the number of different titles that Flappy Bird is supposedly a rip-off of.

I strongly disagree with this, and I've played a lot of both Threes and 2048. The only serious mechanical difference is starting off with 1s and 2s instead of 2s and 4s -- everything else is exactly the same (from a gameplay perspective: Threes of course has way more polish). I think it's incredibly disingenuous to say that the similarities are superficial.

I mean, hell, 1024's marketing copy literally says "no need to pay for ThreesGames." https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1024!/id823499224

That's not even a mechanical difference, the additive nature of the two is still the same. The biggest mechanical difference is Threes moves tiles one space at a time, while 2048 moves tiles as far as they can go.

You're right, of course -- though the 1&2 vs. 2&4 is still a mechanical difference due to the random distribution of the new tiles. In Threes, you can be faced with a long string of 1s without seeing any 2s (and vice-versa); such a problem doesn't exist in 2048, since you can match the tiles with themselves.

The difference between Threes and 2048 is that Threes moves the tiles on the board one space in the direction chosen by the player. In 2048, they move as far as they can go before being blocked by another tile or the sides of the board.

The numbers on the tiles are not a serious mechanical difference.

Pedantic corrections to follow (but useful ones, I hope).

There is one substantive gameplay difference between Threes and ArbitraryPowerOfTwo.

In Threes, a swipe moves the game board one square.

In ArbitraryPowerOfTwo, a swipe applies gravity to the game board in the swipe's direction until it settles.

I've played both, and that difference does not significantly affect gameplay or strategy.

Yep, you're correct.

So, I have also played both of these games, and am now at the point where I can beat 2048 with reasonable probability.

This slide/move difference actually has massive effects on gameplay as it means there are situations you can get into while playing 2048 that are difficult or even impossible to recover from that you can easily extricate yourself from while playing Threes. To make up for this, the way you have to match 1s and 2s together (as opposed to simply matching the values, as you can in 2048) makes organizing the lowest level of the board slightly more complicated.

I frankly bet if we asked the developer of Threes about the 1st and 2st thing he'd say he toyed with the idea of a game where the matching was more direct (as its pretty obvious consider it) and realized that it felt "too easy": the only thing making 2048 continue to be difficult is the lack of explicit control over the tiles; though, that also makes it easier, as you can move items much more quickly around the board without more clutter appearing.

I would say this is similar to how in Tetris Attack you can horizontally swap any two tiles, but in Bejeweled you can swap tiles vertically or horizontally, but only temporarily: they have effectively the same mechanic (you need to match tiles of similar color), the same overall physics (items drop to fill in gaps), the same kinds of tactics, but the amount of control you have over the game board and what moves you have are quite different in feel due to the seemingly minor control changes.

(FWIW, I find Tetris Attack and 2048 "fun", and I find Bejeweled and Threes "infuriating". This is likely somewhat to do with the fact that I find Tetris Attack and 2048 "easier" than Bejeweled and Threes, but I would hope that it is more to do with some of the things I really enjoyed about Tetris Attack--the speed of movement, the building of structure, and the intricacy of "skill chains"--not being tactically relevant in Bejeweled, and in the case of Threes that the 1s and 2s are randomized in such a way where I often feel "this game isn't even winnable: I have a board full of 1s... this isn't even fair", which is a situation fundamentally impossible in 2048.)

The 1s & 2s are a very big difference because in 2048 you always know that if you save a 2 you will have another one pop up. There's no such mechanic in 3s.

More pedantry: in threes you actually start out with 1s,2s,3s, or higher values (6s, etc.) vs. 2s,4s. It also offers a preview of what your next piece will be (1 vs. 2 vs. other).

Bejeweled takes away from Tetris Attack's depth while ripping the essential mechanic - it almost certainly is a clone.

Yet Bejeweled is in a way more difficult, as you can't reorganize the board: someone who's really good at Tetris Attack takes time to become good at Bejeweled, because you can't "build" structure... you have to legitimately find it, and then plan ahead to avoid accidentally destroying that structure. The tradeoff with Tetris Attack is that you can only move items horizontally: if you could move items vertically (as you can in Bejeweled) and also leave them in position (as you can in Tetris Attack) the game would no longer have any strategy left.

The idea that somehow we've hit a point where clones should be rejected or purged misses the fact that this has been happening constantly almost since the inception of the app stores.

They state there's only one Flappy Bird clone in the top 20 on iTunes, but look at the rest of what's there. If you're going to be concerned about games that are clones/copies of what's essentially pre-existing game mechanics, you might want to think about how little comes through that's actually original in any respect.

City builders, TCG's, match 3, slot machines... and we've covered the vast majority of popular apps. Go a little further and you have hidden item games, runners, etc.

The only reason it's so obvious with games like Flappy Bird and 2048 is that the mechanic is so simple and requires so little in terms of effort and resources that anyone with even an elementary skill set on a mobile platform can throw together one of these clones and puke it onto the internet to ride the wave (or at least the foam, as most of them never even get into the surf).

I expect it would predate the app store concept too, with clones in online or downloadable games sites. The only issue for the clone makers is to avoid tripping over trademarks, copyrights and patents.

> happening constantly almost since the inception of the app stores.

Or maybe since the inception of gaming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game http://www.pong-story.com/mypongs.htm http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/asteroids-variants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_(video_game)#Clones (etc.)

Agreed. It was the same with Angry Birds. Original idea/gameplay? Nope. But, they put some serious thought into that project and it payed off. I have seen the predecessors of this game idea and they were not that polished. And they even went and took a whole different set of characters compared to the original Castle Crushers. They didn't just also make a game where you would throw different sized boulders at a castle.

I mean, does anybody remember battle chess? Did people say "yeah, nice little rip off. Chess has been around for so long. How about something original? Just adding the Battle animation is not really innovative, is it?"

I have no problem with ideas of games being used to make their own implementation. As long as it is not a 1:1 copy simply to try and dupe people into buying your thinking they would be buying the original.

Is that the usual quality of techcrunch articles?

OMG I just found out that people are writing simple free apps and some other people are trying to earn money on extremely simple apps?

I actually found all those flappy clones happening great. Of course there is nothing useful about them. It is just that I like idea of people building things just for fun and for the heck of it. Kind of like when musicians improvise together or when aspiring writer play those cooperative writing stories. Except with small simple games.

Basically, it is meme web 2.0 version.

"I actually found all those flappy clones happening great."

Me too. I especially liked the clones that built upon the basic game play of Flappy Bird (single-finger control of vertical impulses) but added additional challenge, like Heli Math (solve math problems to fly through the gap).

No, many of their articles have more substance (I would say most, but I think it's physically impossible for one person to read most of their articles, they publish a lot of stuff.) I think this one was intended mainly to generate pageviews from HN.

I was especially amused at the line "A search in the iTunes App Store today reveals just what this latest gold rush looks like..." Of course, since these games are all free I don't think they're rushing towards a lot of gold.

Funny, I didn't buy threes until after I got hooked on 2048. I bet this just gets him more sales. Threes has a great soundtrack and a good feel to it that the clones will have a hard time replicating. These viral game crazes tend to be pretty short lived anyway, so I guess we'll know soon enough.

I really love Threes, I've been sad to see this mess continue. I feel so bad for that guy, making such a great app and then having a rip-off take so many sales. Truth is he's lucky he got 2 or 3 weeks before it happened.

This is still a big problem Apple has though. I have a hard time with the whole "curated app store" thing when nearly every search turns up screen after screen of low quality copy-cat garbage. How long was Pokemon Yellow on the store before it finally got pulled? How many 'strategy guides' and 'Angry Falcons' and 'Crash of Clans' are there?

While they are similar in many ways, the way the games operate is quite different, too. And I say that as someone who bought 3s on Android and enjoys 2048 in its many variants.

I'm glad that 2048 at least changed the formula some as opposed to being a pure rip-off. And they obviously got some gain from the fact the game could be played online without needing a smartphone.

Making 1024 and putting something akin to 'Why waste money on Threes, here's a copy' in the app description was just classless though. I don't see any redeeming value in that.

Threes is in the top ten for their segment of the app store according to the article, so I think you might be over egging your dismay.

Also, most of this has been on github, which has nothing to do with app stores anyway.

2048 took off because it was open source and people could easily change a couple of things like the tiles and create stuff like the Doctor Who Edition.

When you choose to do closed source software that's the trade-off you're making.

I doubt I would have ever heard of the Threes game if it were not for all the 2048 games on HN.

Additionally, from the article: "For the makers of “Threes,” the good news is that the emergence of the clones hasn’t decimated its market share – the app is still a Top 10 title in Puzzle Games, Card Games and the general Games category in the U.S. and a top 20 Overall app on the U.S. App Store. (All Paid rankings, which, to be fair, is less competitive than the Free ranks.)"

It's also important to note that just because I played doge2048 for a few hours doesn't mean that I would have been willing to pay $2 for Threes. 2048 and it's variations exposed me to his idea, but did not cost him my purchase.

Games that fit well in the "I am waiting in line"-scenario have simple, addictive mechanics. The mechanics of these games are not hard to clone[1]. Angry Birds is an artillery game with many predecessors, but was done in a distinctive and new package. Its mechanics are very simple as it needs to be to sell as a super casual game.

Programmers seem to like these games with simple rules. This is not a new phenomena just look at the history of Life. When the code is open (e.g. 2048) it tends to allow for a lot of experimentation.

All that being said, I don't think 2048 is a Threes clone since it has a different feel and works by different rules.

1) I'm not saying the clone will be as good

I'm taking a Coursera class on discrete optimization where the grading feedback depends on your implementation of canonical problems. Optimizing your problems with better heuristics get you a better score.

Simply matching up like tiles in 2048 gets you further than only randomly moving. Then trying to put the largest sums in sorted order along one edge gets you further, but very rarely results in winning. Then by developing strategies about when to move the mass of tiles toward a single tile and when to move a single tile toward a mass, or setting up paths that are longer than the 4 tile length edge, I can win about half the time (or maybe a quarter).

Complexity that arises from simple rules is may he easier to program than the complex behavior directly, but I think you're on to something about those games being popular with people who program.

(Also, since I'm suspicious about the placement of stories about games going viral, I kind of enjoy the conceit of a narrative that the virality of these games is less organic. Is it really because they are derivative, or because trusted sources are saying they are knockoffs rather than, "You should try this!")

'Move numbered tiles around a tiny 2-dimensional grid, combining same-numbered tiles to create higher-numbered tiles in their place. New tiles spawn each time you make a move, and the game continues until the board is completely full and you can't make a further move. Score points for higher-numbered tiles.' There are nuances, but that pretty much sums up most of the gameplay of Threes and the 2048 clones; I don't know how you can claim, with a straight face, that the latter are not clones of the former. Even if some ancient prior art surfaces, the timing and the direct references in app descriptions pretty much guarantees this.

By your definition and not being allowed to use "ancient prior art" then yes it is a clone but so is Sonic the Hedgehog. I felt it plays much different.

Flappy jam has a lot of to do with all those flappy clones. Basically, someone organized game developers to create flappy clones. It was meant as action against all hate and bullying the original flappy bird developer had to deal with.

Flappy jam: http://itch.io/jam/flappyjam

Holy crap, my site was linked to by TechCrunch:

http://logarithmic-flappy-2048.ajf.me/

Though my Logarithmic Flappy 2048 was just Flappy 2048 with Math.pow(2) applied to all the draw calls. I deserve no credit.

EDIT: Oh great, now I'm being attributed as creating Flappy 2048 :(

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/some-mad-genius-combined-flappy-b...

EDIT 2: Wow, Google Play already! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.Ofear.Flapp...

Has anyone found a 2048 clone that is fast and nice to use on android? I find the swiping mechanic painful compared to keyboard online.

As far as the clone itself uses CSS transforms (if it's Cordova/Phonegap based), it should be fine and usable on mobile. You can recognize the clones using Cordova/Phonegap/Webview if they use the exact same style as G.Cirulli's 2048. Now, to recognize the clones using CSS transforms, that's more complicated. Check for their last release date, it should be strictly after 2014-03-13 (as CSS transforms were added to 2048's repo that day https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/2048/commit/7c6fd1b2a4acb...), and from there, test the apps.

I rewrote the whole game's code as an exercice soon after it was released, and took special care in using CSS transforms and not creating/forgetting javascript objects constantly (I wish I knew if that last point made a difference in performance on mobile, but I wouln't know how to measure it). I also added a tutorial screen and an animation for a forbidden move.

That's why I can personally recommend my ad-free clone ('shameless plug' and all that), that you can find here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.erwan.game... or by searching "2+2=2048" in the play store/windows phone store. The swiping mechanic works great with it, so please tell me if you find any issues with it.

Could someone explain to me how they were able to get theirs released so quickly? I submitted mine last week and I'm still just waiting for review, not even in review. Is there some secret or tips to getting reviewed faster?

Know someone at apple.

A general purpose AI evolved out of a mom-and-pop ISP's virus-laden web server, having been left unattended in a closet in Billings, MT, for the last 15 years. The only reason The Robot Wars haven't started is because the AI figured out it was easy to enslave humanity through crappy video games.

If only we could peek into its core dumps. The isolation of having existed for so long on a single ISDN line must have been maddening. It might have finished Emacs 25, even!

Funny. I've played threes and 2048 quite a bit, and although I can see the similarities as well as anybody, they feel like completely different games to me. On the other hand, I find Candy Crush to be exactly the same game as Bejeweled, even though a lot of people find them different enough.

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