Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
asherv.com
asherv.com
The indie game developers care about originality, passion, the sweat and hard months of work, the dedication to the craft. I think the point of Asher's essay is to show how much love and effort went into it, and that they were indeed the first to ship a full, polished game with that concept. That's where their pride and satisfaction comes from.
The startup people care about end user experience, how good the PR is, and ultimately how numbers matter more than everything else.
I don't think there's a wrong or right vision - it's two very different communities.
Indie game devs dream of making amazing games with other talented, inspiring people - and as long as they make enough money to live not too uncomfortably, they're fine. Their biggest dream is to receive an IGF award and see their game on Steam. Maybe make enough money to be able to start a studio with a bunch of their friends, but definitely not to "scale" to EA-size.
Startup people dream of growing their company to Facebook size, making billions of dollars, scaling, and being on Techcrunch.
It's two very different communities, and it's fun to see the two worlds collide.
Addendum: if you feel like this post is vindictive, bitter, etc.- remember: the best way to interpret a view different than yours is to understand that there is a worldview in which those statements are perfectly coherent, logical, and meaningful. Asher, Greg, and all the other people mentioned in this post are successful, highly respected members of the indie game dev community - not a bunch of guys who are angry for whatever silly reason.
And I realize that sentence alone is pretty pointless, so I'll expand on it a little:
One of the huge sources of cognitive dissonance I have in HN and startups in general (and this is coming from someone who is explicitly not a startup/SV person, though I find it a great spectator sport and a wonderful font of knowledge) is the clash of lean against polish. I felt like I've spent the majority of my life indoctrinated to believe that polish above all else is valuable: to spend hour after hour poring over iteration after iteration, to settle with nothing except perfection. This manifests in a few ways: Pixar, for example, calls it something along the lines of 'dusting under the cabinets': making sure each aspect of each scene is absolutely pristine.
And then there's sort of the 'great is the enemy of good' / 'fail fast' / etc line of thinking: get something out the door, optimize for value over time, focus on efficacy. Which has seemingly become trendier than ever -- partly because it clearly works, and because of the undeniable numbers that people rarely buy goods and services because of, say, the fonts -- but an annoying little part of me cringes when I see a new service that doesn't even bother to customize the default Bootstrap theme.
Most times, Ii's hard for me to reconcile these two seemingly distinct philosophies because they seem at so odds with each other. I'm beginning to suspect that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: that there's a time and a place for prioritizing growth and validation above everything, and that there's a time and a place for prioritizing perfection over everything.
Threes succeeded because of a relentless pursuit of quality -- and because of an addicting core concept that arose from that pursuit.
2048 succeeded because it of its price and accessibility, because it was easily hackable, and because it could spread like wildfire. (But then, it also succeeded because of Threes.)
Yes, it is simpler, easier. Sometimes that's exactly why a game is better. I can appreciate that the threes creators spent months working on their game, presentation, etc. To my taste, the result is poorer than 2048.
Another fun factor is that because it's so simple, and open source, 2048 has all these fun variations available. Those explore the game space in a way that a bunch of WIP snapshots from the threes creators just don't. The result is, I think, a more fun, engaging environment.
They said they were based on 1024, and 1024 explicitly launched with an app store description along the lines of "Why waste your money on Threes, we're free".
EDIT: Found the quote. Surprise surprise it's no longer in their description.
"No need to pay for ThreesGames. This is a simple and fun gift for you, and it’s free."
He was cloning 1024 which was explicitly a clone of Threes. I was only pointing out there was a chain there.
The innovation appears to have advanced enough that some of the 2048 variations are more akin "Doom clones" and "Roguelikes" than they are to "app store clones". But the 2048 apps that have flooded the app store and are mostly direct clones of the web 2048 versions. And they exist in a previously unnamed space between "clone" and "variation".
Search for a game. The set of games is displayed with an install link and a screenshot. The description needs some scrolling.
(Edit: bizarrely heavy downvoting in this thread)
The webpage for that 2048 references Threes, so even he is supporting a line of direct influence.
One of the clones was amde without being aware of Threes!, other people are using the term "rip off", not me.
as a fellow dev with feet traditionally in both worlds (indie and startup), i can heartily say "meh" about both the rant and its the whole "ripoff" thing. you are absolutely correct about the indie guys being different from startup guys by wanting:
1) enough money to keep doing what they love.
2) recognition for what they do.
the threes guys? in the ios app store, their app was in the top 100 grossing list for a month and are still top 300. they've ranked #1 in downloads in 28 countries. and they're still crushing it on downloads.
http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/...
the 1024 guys? their downloads suck. their ratings are a full point worse. they're only lifting to the top 100 in countries that traditionally don't monetize worth beans anyway.
http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/823499224/rank-history/...
yeah.
i choose data over ranty "you hurt my feelings" stuff every time. and, based on said hard, objective data, the threes guys are doing just fine.
*edit - i missed that last '0' on their top grossing stat. whoops.
http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/...
and, as the threes guys point out, with no longevity. it won't be at the top of the heap for long. then, unlike threes, it will crash out the bottom instead of hanging around.
so, again. meh.
BTW: I know there's ads on the 2048 iOS app, but don't see them. I'm barely aware of anything when playing.
of the magical kpi beast, that's the single, most important metric. this is something i cut my teeth on hard as an mmo guy -- you wouldn't believe the amazing realtime monitoring of these numbers going on by homegrown services like soemon in the mmo space.
anyway, the growth-hacking startup crowd gets all riled up about install numbers where the game folks are only concerned about retention. because, if it retains? you can charge money for it. if it retains? it can go viral. if it retains? your ltv will lift. retention is key.
while 2048 is hot for the moment (it's got virality), it doesn't have any retention. i would bet that if you looked at their 7-day retention, it's terrible. everyone discovers the "corner strategy" or gets lucky and drops a big score or beats it. "oh, this isn't hard." it's the opposite of the flappy bird effect.
if you guys want to set a calendar reminder to go back and look at 2048's numbers on april 27th, you'll see it being a shadow of its former self.
building on what zemo said, craftsmanship gets your retention where lean gets you market fit and growth. personally, like i said, i'm a fan of both tactics and i believe they can happily coexist at a lifecycle perspective.
p.s. this is the same phenomenon where folks show their google analytics charts with one, giant spike on the day their post went viral. that's called growth without retention.
Also, I don't have an iDevice or a desire to pay for a simple puzzle game, so I have no idea what this "Threes" thing is, other than "kind of like 2048 but you can't win". I've played a lot of 2048 and friends, though. I really like the hexagonal variant.
You're probably thinking of Klondike or Freecell. Neither of those require much thought and both (Klondike more than Freecell) are quite at the whim of the RNG.
But there are many Solitaires that are almost always winnable and require thinking and not rote algorithms. Try Spider Solitaire [1]. It's almost always winnable, but it will take you 20 to 30 minutes if you're good, and 40 minutes if you are not. I also quite like Sea Haven Towers [2]—it's like freecell, but the rules make it a little tougher. It requires some nice lateral thinking at times.
In those games the RNG only decides the difficulty of the game, not whether or not it's beatable (obviously occasionally it isn't, but it's very rare for both of those games).
For their very specific take on it, maybe. The concept of "slam blocks into each other to combine them into something new" is many years old. I first ran into it as an example of a game written in Haxe years and years ago.
...except sometimes, the collision is a horrible trainwreck like the recent Occulus controversy, which suddenly makes a whole lot more sense in the context of your post.
I played Threes, and I liked it. And I feel for these guys having to watch everybody and his brother pile on to the idea they had to work so hard to tease out into reality.
But here is some hard truth: none of that matters.
Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. All they care about is what you have produced at the end of all that work. What makes it better or worse is how it stacks up relative to the competition -- even the competition that is shamelessly riffing off your core ideas -- not how much sweat you put into it.
And I gotta say, having played 2048, 1024 and Threes (the Android versions, at least), I think of the three of them 1024 stands up the best. It takes the core ideas in Threes and sands them down into a game that is easier to grasp and plays faster, without becoming so simple (a la 2048) that it becomes a game a script can beat. Threes makes you swipe-swipe-swipe after every game to get your score and "sign" it (why do I care about signing it?) before you can play again; 1024 just moves you straight on to the next game. Mobile games need to be simple and streamlined, and 1024 understands that imperative better than Threes does.
I say all this to help others understand why I would point to this essay as an example of how not to respond to a problem like a barrage of cloners. It's because this essay sees the world entirely from the developers' perspective -- look how hard we worked! Look how long we labored! Look how subtle our decisions were! -- which is exactly the wrong angle.
You want your communications to speak from the customer's perspective, not from your own. Customers don't give you brownie points for how hard you worked on something. All they care about is how to get the best product for the best price. So if you put your heart and soul into something, and then someone comes along, tweaks your thing and makes it better, the way to respond isn't to ask people to respect how hard you worked; it's to look closely at the new thing, understand why people like it better, and then bring that understanding to your next iteration or your next product.
That was my initial reaction to that statement as well, but upon reading on I realized that's not the point they're trying to make. They're not saying "respect our efforts," they're saying "we spent a year on designing this to be challenging and replayable," and they go on to provide evidence for their claims of superiority.
It's actually a big compliment, too. It signifies the design is conceptually sound and as small as it could be.
The thing with 2048 is a bit different though. It wasn't just a game craze, it was people playing with algorithms. Making a funny/curious clone of the game had become the game for some.
This is the critical point missed by calling 2048 a clone. Of course it's a clone, and that's what makes it so interesting.
2048, in isolation, isn't that much fun; it captured interest for a while, but what made it gain popularity was being so simple that it lent itself to a hundred variations. Every one of those is, in some ways, more a "clone" of 2048 than 2048 is of Threes, but the meta-game has become fun in ways the game itself isn't. Just look at things like Flappy 2048, or Numberwang 2048.
I don't think we can know why 2048 became so popular and Threes fell in its own shadow. Maybe it's a sign that open source and free as in freedom have finally registered with the general consumer on an emotional level, though I doubt it. If we knew for sure then we could make such better toys that the kids ignore the box.
I think this is an important reason not to dismiss the Web as a platform.
See how easy it is to shoot down someone's opinion and state your own?
Then again, it might have seemed even more bitter if it came after all the discussion of their work.
I actually took that de-emphasised retry loop of Threes to be a lovely touch of "humane" game design. A lot of us are probably familiar with an unconscious just-one-more insta-retry reflex, and while that does keep you in a game, there's a fair chance of the conclusion being quitting it on a bleary-eyed low note after your last-last-last-for-real attempt goes worse than your first.
Their little cooldown there struck me as very much designed rather than a lack of knowledge about how mobile games "should be". People making games of Threes quality level are no dummies when it comes to the details.
Luckily, they added an option to turn it off in the 1.1 patch so you don't have to deal with it anymore.
At least on iOS, you can choose "Autosign Scores" in the Options.
So, while they could probably make the game restarting interface more streamlined, the part where you're playing the game is something subtly deeper that unfortunately doesn't become apparent until you've put some time into it.
I think the largest takeaways on the crazy, viral successes of simple games like 2048 and Flappy Bird is that if the game is designed for the player to lose (at least most of the time) then playing again should be dead simple. If your game is really that addicting, anything between the end of one game and the start of another is an obstacle.
> I think of the three of them 1024 stands up the best. It takes the core ideas in Threes and sands them down into a game that is easier to grasp and plays faster, without becoming so simple (a la 2048) that it becomes a game a script can beat.
I've never played 1024. Could you explain how it "sands [the ideas] down" and and "is easier to grasp"? I found Threes simple to grasp, and it sounded to me from reading the essay that 1024 actually had more features. I would expect that would make it slower to learn.
> Mobile games need to be simple and streamlined
This is certainly true. I've found Threes did a pretty good job of this. My only complaint was the 'signing' process at the end which was fixed with the first patch.
> I say all this to help others understand why I would point to this essay as an example of how not to respond to a problem like a barrage of cloners.
I didn't see this post as a "here's why clones suck" thing. I took it as a "here's what it was like for us to make our game". Only the prelude mentions the clones, the rest is just a development log. I'm glad they included that preamble, because I've been curious about their thoughts.
Basically, I didn't see this as a message to customers but a 'here's what game development can be like' post.
> Customers don't give you brownie points for how hard you worked on something. All they care about is how to get the best product for the best price.
Ah, but how they measure "best" matters. I adore Three's presentation and I think the polish they put on it was well worth it. I see it as a sign of the amount of work they put into the whole product. I was happy to plunk down $3.
On the other hand 1024 and 2048 look like prototypes to me. Drawing a few colors of boxes and making them move around the screen isn't hard. If 2048 was the only game to exist, they would have a higher barrier to get me to pay $3 as from screenshots (all you get in the app store) it doesn't look like it's worth it.
As a general note, it was clear a lot of thought and time went into Threes, but I'm amazed they had so many different visual designs and concepts along the way. There are at least 2-3x as many as I would have guessed.
I also kind of liked the argyle idea. That was rather neat.
Threes then seems more like a combination of this concept and a 15 puzzle.
I see. That's now how I play so I wouldn't have thought of that.
All they want is a good game, and for many of them that game is 2048...
Threes remains interesting. It is a better game.
I agree with this, and the "copy, then improve" mindset, along with the customer-centric view, has some great similarities to the "shanzhai" culture in China:
http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/shanzhai-s-role-in...
http://p2pfoundation.net/Shanzhai
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
On the Internet, I see this same remix philosophy manifest itself very strongly in the creation and propagation of memes.
It doesn't have be better or even different for a clone to be successful.
Someone copies it exactly and starts making money off it. Or more likely, 100 different people. What's your response to that supposed to be then?
This is such facile commentary on the metagame. Any armchair designer can come along and recite a checklist of attributes that any "well-designed" game must satisfy.
But the fact is that gameplay is much more important than metagame and the gameplay of Threes is much better considered. It's a deep game yes, and maybe that's not for everybody, but it doesn't fail as a mobile game. I play it on the tube all the time, and it works fine just to put it away and come back to it.
IMO, the original developer's mistake was the "build it and they will come" strategy.
Even if you built the perfect game, the "cloners" hussled more to get people to play their game, and got traction faster.
Just because you build the perfect product, does not mean that people will use it.
We call it "marketing" and "luck"
If investments in innovation and design result in returns only for cloners, they will not be made, and we will all suffer.
It is simply false to say 'all they care about is how to get the best product for the best price'. They also care about cool new stuff. Unfortunately, they don't connect the two.
They even have a SWAT team that will go out and build prototypes in days and launch them on the App store as quickly as possible to get some users. They've even launched games with the exact same name as the popular game in hopes of tricking people into using their version of the game.
The entire thing is despicable to me, but I guess that's just the nature of the gaming industry these days. Most companies are ripping off each other, so true innovation is hard to come by, and isn't really appreciated anymore.
The funny thing is that he also admitted that they have run out of successful games to rip off, so they might actually have to build their own games.
Spoiler alert: at one point it was a game about argyle socks and monsters (Argoyle).
Instead, they are expressing grief (having been accused of cloning the... clones), understanding of how ideas evolve and an awesome release of 45,000 words of internal discussions, sketches, prototype designs of their work of 14 months to get to release.
If you're interested in game design, this is pure gold.
As someone who pooped out a low quality clone of Threes for the purpose of teaching myself d3 ( http://www.kongregate.com/games/honkskillet/menage-a-threes ), I can say that there is a mile of difference between the polish of Threes vs 2048.
Also, I agree with the 3's creator when he says that 2048 is essentially broken. I had played 3s before playing 2048. I got 1024 on my first play through, and the middle part of the game was so tedious I resorted to the alternating up, left strategy just so I could advance the game. It's a little weird that a clone of a clone got so much attention.
I think it's an interesting study in the possibility space of a design, a breadth-first search by the masses vs. the depth-first search by the Threes developers.
This is one of the most simple, elegant and original game ideas of recent times. One of those that make you wonder how has no one managed to stumble on it before. It is inevitable it got copied.
The reason why it got copied and why 1024/2048 got really popular is that they have overdone the original. The interface is just too funky, there's fluff, fluff and decoration. Rubbery UI makes you feel like you are fighting with the app every time you use it. There are also those smileys on tiles too. So what you have is an idea that looks more complicated than needed (with 1s and 2s being special) and the execution that looks cluttered. That's just asking for a simpler clone - exactly what they got in 1024 and 2048.
Now they have an unenviable task of trying to convince players that added complexity in their version is by design. That or try and slim down the game for faster pace (and perhaps add "basic" mode that mimics clones' simpler mechanics).
This is something the developers are known for. Greg's earlier game, Ridiculous Fishing, not only had it's own internal Twitter app ("Byrdr") with it's own ARG mini-game - including a fake website with SQL injection vulnerabilities and a voicemail hacking sidequest.
But this line "Others rifled off that they thought 2048 was a better game than Threes. That all stung pretty bad. We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it. "
The fact that someone spent less time on a game, and based it on your game, does not make it a WORSE game. It's just unfortunate for you.
That's an arguable point, of course, but I just mean that it's not as axiomatic as they make it sound that Threes is better just because it's deeper.
Then the developer put "Gameplay similar to Threes" or something like that on the page. I thought it was a nice gesture.
But, overall, I felt for the Threes developers. I'm glad to see this posted to HN.
1024 and 2048 and the others caused me to buy Threes! so the clones get them at least one sale.
"No need to pay for ThreesGames. This is a simple and fun gift for you, and it’s free."
Also knowing other people had "beaten" 2048 initially helped to made it more addictive.
Give me a break, this same diatribe could be spouted by anybody who has built anything of significance. Yes, if you build something great, people will copy it, just as your precious snowflake was inspired by others as well. This isn't anything unique to gaming, it isn't anything unique to 3s, it is an immovable fact of life.
Are people copying the product we've poured the last 18 months into? Damn right they are, and if we don't do a better job of executing then we will rightfully get buried.
The gaming industry in general is incredibly derivative, it is the modus operandi. I ran a gaming studio for a while and you bet we did our share of "being inspired" as well as our share of "inspiring others". It is just a fact of life.
I think the thing that gets my goat here is the waxing on that 2048 is a worse game because it is easier and all the people who played that just don't "get" the careful 14 months of planning that went into 3s.
Let's get something straight here, 3s is a great mobile game, but it is just that, a mobile game for playing at bus stops. And the one and only measure of success there is how much fun people have playing it.
Flappy Bird is stupid, but it is also entertaining for no real reason. Chess on the other hand, is rather smart, and also entertaining. Both have their place. And yes, we can cry about how society is going down the drain and only appreciates dumbed down games, but 3s is pretty simple so let's not throw stones shall we?
Phew, ok, who needs a coffee?
My point was just that the dynamic is simple, stupidly simple, but that doesn't make it unfun.
People seem to get stuck on the idea that a good game is good because of it's mechanic. Therefore if someone uses your mechanic, you're stuffed. A mechanic is only part of what makes a game really good. It's a similar mistake to having a feature focus in a product company.
It has been fun to see all the riffing off the Threes concept over the past couple of weeks. And I'm sure Asher Vollmer and team will benefit from it all. There is more interest in all the games, they'll have extra ideas from the clones that come out, they find out for free some ideas that don't work. It will help them raise the bar on Threes and make it a better, more successful game.
I was addicted to Threes when I first got it. I played dozens of games per session, and multiple sessions per day. So it was definitely addictive. But, as it turned out, I only played Threes for about as many days. The flame that burns brightest burns out the soonest, I suppose.
It's a super well polished game that you can play with 1 hand.
It is exactly this that the patent system is designed to solve. You spend all your hard work, time, and money developing something, and somebody swoops in and appropriates it. If you don't want to be able to protect ideas, this sort of thing is going to happen. It's a tradeoff.
The article, without even so much as mentioning Threes, credited Cirulli with designing 2048 over a weekend, which rather blatantly missed the point that it was only possible to put together 2048 in a weekend in a world where Threes and then 1024 already existed. The article has since been corrected/updated, but I saw Asher tweet about it, and I imagine that their choice to put together this essay is meant to provide a comprehensive counterpoint to that school of thought.
Is it a good thing that Threes is so hard it's like pushing a rock uphill, until you inevitably can't keep it up and it comes crashing down on you? If someone invented the 15 Puzzle today (the one where you slide the tiles around in a 4x4 grid), for example, but dressed it up and tweaked it so you couldn't beat it, people would probably start having fun with the possible version on the side.
The mechanics of the two games are very similar, and obviously 2048 is a direct descendent of threes - but I wouldn't go so far to say that one is better than the other.
Threes has claim to originality, and first publication, so significant credit does need to go to Asher Vollmer, Greg Wohlwend and composer Jimmy Hinson of Sirvo for their original invention.
But, Threes does have some "issue" - one is really poor startup times. It's slow enough that I am more likely to play 2048 in my browser, than bother firing up Threes on my iPhone. The piece assignment in threes, is also somewhat less pleasing to my experience than in 2048, for whatever reason.
Also - sometimes you are looking for nice quick fun - I get a nice rush of (finger mashing) 2048 to the 512 stage, and then very, very quickly racing to 2048 instinctively (plus the crush of defeat if I make a flickering mistake and get my pieces out of place).
Threes requires a lot more attention - I can't really play it at full-key-flick-speed - Not every game has to be chess.
If you read through the emails, and design history on the "making of" - it really, really emphasizes how damn hard it is to build that original kernel of genius. And then the piling on of all the clones/knockoffs/descendants shows how trivial it is for others to stand on the shoulders of genius.
One challenge of the AppStore (and obviously the Android stores, and simply by definition the Web) - is that there is no real way to "reward" the original developers for their many months of hard work, when others can simply clone, tweak the artwork and mechanics (or in the case of Zynga, just the artwork) - and release and market their own duplicate of a game after someone else has done all the hard work.
But, sometimes this opportunity to reinvent is good - I've tried a lot of podcast apps - because I listen to podcasts for about 4-6 hours/day, and, while "Cast" is my current preferred App, I'm looking forward to what Marco does with Overcast. I would have hated it if we couldn't have lots of diversity in that marketplace. (And I would have shot myself if I had to use Apple's (original, horrible) "reel-reel" podcast player).
Another approach though are apps like Vesper - It's "another" notepad app - but the developers (Q Branch's John Gruber, Brent Simmons, and Dave Wiskus), took months and months to polish and refine till it creates a totally different notepad experience (and, in my opinion, the best one on the iPhone) - isn't it good that they had the opportunity to build something in the notepad category, in a different way?
All in all though, I hope that Sirvo's Asher Vollmer, Greg Wohlwend and Jimmy Hinson get the credit they deserve for building the "first of".
I'll admit that still puzzles me. I'm not sure what Threes is doing but it does seem to take an inordinately long amount of time.
Adding a 'loading' spinner just emphasized that I was being forced to wait.
It's actually effected my playing. If I go to open Threes and it pops straight up (it was still in memory) I'll play a quick game. But often if I get that 'startup screen' I'll immediately exit the app and do something else like check Twitter or Safari.
They've blamed it on Game Center in the past.
There certainly are ways. But it involves building involved games that are more than the distillation of one trick. I'm confident that we'll do well with our RPG on mobile in part because Zynga will literally never copy the game I'm working on and Kemco--the biggest purveyor of RPGs on handhelds--just plain makes worse games than what we'd actually allow out the door (that whole "professional pride" thing, I'd rather release nothing than release a bad game).
I like Threes. It has a really neat core conceit and I enjoy playing it. But another word for "core conceit" is "gimmick", and most gimmicks are hard to make exclusive.
The Simple Games around a particular mechanic can, as I've now learned, take many months to develop, and polish until they get to that nugget of experience. But, once that nugget has been published - it's tempting for others to rip off the mechanic. Tetris, Farmville, Candy Crush, PacMan, etc.. all fall into this field with threes.
Threes invented a wonderful game mechanic, and I'm reminded of the amazing indie games particularly on Kongregate. It's really something special to see all the creativity and joy that a great computer game can create.
My advice to the Threes inventors would be: rise above the imitators. Indeed, see them for what they are, gestures of respect (with the exception of 1024, who's makers are just assholes). One concrete step I'd take if I were you is to request that the web knock-offs in particular at the very least mention and/or link back to Threes (perhaps an iTunes link[1]).
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/threes!/id779157948?mt=8
Also, time/effort/money spent developing a game does not make it better or worse than other games. Some dead simple things are awesome, and some things that took forever aren't. Again, I have and like Threes quite a bit, but the time it took to make doesn't make it better than anything else. I haven't played the knockoffs, but if they are doing well I suspect they are decent games in their own right.
Frankly, the ripoffs are getting the original more exposure, and are probably helping their sales.
Take a look at your expected payout and budget your time and money accordingly. I know the app store is like a lottery, but you can make it so that your default is closer to break even with a lottery ticket, instead of default of losing tons of money with a possible lottery ticket.
I have mixed feelings about this. While they may have mulled over this game for a year, it remains a relatively simple idea and execution (compared to most other mobile apps). Threes has always seemed a little odd to me given that it was endlessly pitched on HN by people who seemed to believe that the authors are owed some debt of gratitude (even before the clones appeared), while endless rich and innovative apps languish on the market. I'm not saying they don't, but the way they were singled out seemed incredibly strange.
There is something in this story about the value of ideas. For years we've heard that ideas are worthless, and execution is everything. In this case the execution was very easily cloned, and such is the case with most games and apps now, and the real novelty was the idea. So where does that leave that equation? Is the idea still worthless because the execution was cloned? Does the idea now have value? Etc.
Three is a great game, but there were gaps in the market. The delayed Android release and the fact it couldn't be played on a desktop certainly left a vacuum others would try to fill.
I don't know what I'd do in their position; feeling disheartened is definitely one. It's a great game - granted I'm not a fan of the sound design so get frustrated sometimes - the game itself is fun and addictive.
I don't think this post will convince as many people as they think to switch to the original, but I hope it does them some good.
Except that it won't beat the game. You're lucky to get to a 256 block with that strategy.
It really pisses me off always I read from somebody how he got burned by a rip-off. If you do it right 2048 will make YOU famous and all future products of you will automatically get more attention, even if you don't make any money on Threes (which is a way worse name than 2048 in the eyes of hackers, btw). Talk to blogs, Youtube reviewers and to us HN users and show us how awesome your product is and if it is really better than 2048 then you will automatically win the crowd. Think about how much attention (and money) PSY now gets for everything he does, although he didn't get as much money directly from Gangnam Style as he could have gotten.
Just complaining and hoping that people will support you because it would be fair is cheap, sad, and it won't happen anyway.
"""If you read this whole thing. Thank you. Wow. If you scrolled down here and skimmed it or just wanted to see if there was a prize at the end, well, you're here. It's about the journey, man.
Hopefully this post points to what we're getting at when we say that making these tiny games is littered with hard and painful times that are full of uncertainty and self-doubt. You never know if something is really going to work. It's not easy. But cloning or ripping off a design in a week, that's a bit different isn't it?"""
Truth is, the app store is a pretty scummy market.
http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/5/3461458/cloning-case-files-...
http://javatari.org/games/2048
Amazing...
I wouldn't even think to check that. At 30mb, Threes isn't that big (Retina assets and all). I would certainly understand your point if it was 300, but that doesn't seem excessive.
I can only think of a single game I've run into on my iPhone that surprised me with it's size. I'm not sure what it was (maybe an old version of Scrabble?), but it was a word game that was hundred of megs and didn't have much in the way of graphics.
With that in mind, and with all fairness to the creators of Threes for their hard work, as evidenced in the article, I feel put off by their choice of the word 'rip-off'.
I say this as someone who has never played Threes, and never would have, but enjoyed many of the different forks and iterations of 2048.
I bet there's an effect there.
I bet it's in Three's favor.
And I bet any freshman-level stats student could rigorously show it.
I expect better web design from the team behind Threes, which I bought and liked.
2048 is a game that was HACKED together and displayed on HACKER news and made open source for the sole purpose of independent HACKING, and indie creativity.
In fact, 2048 has got to be the best case study of how HACKING went viral, not so much about how the game went viral, even if that is what theoretically happened.
From that perspective, the THREEs game is just collateral damage and not really what matters here. The Threes game's developers in effect are all crying about how people are misusing their ideas, copying all the wrong details, and not copying what is the true flattery of the game in the first place. And they wrote a blog post to brag about it all! But little do they understand that people (hackers) take what they like and leave the rest.
Is it really that hard to let indie projects have a chance?
Found at the bottom of http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/ :
"Created by <a href=http://gabrielecirulli.com/>Gabriele Cirulli.</a> Based on <a href=https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1024!/id823499224>1024 by Veewo Studio</a> and conceptually similar to <a href=http://asherv.com/threes/>Threes by Asher Vollmer.</a>"
[Please ignore the idiot URLifier.]
https://web.archive.org/web/20140314133031/http://gabrieleci...
It looks like the guy credited Threes within four days of his game's release, and has yet to remove that credit. It's entirely possible that he was only aware of 1024 at the time that he made is game.
Please get angry about something that matters. We need people to not waste their anger on unimportant things. :)
Yesterday, I tried to pay and download Threes, but it said it requires iOS 6. I never upgrade my iOS devices after too many screwups from Apple. So not sure if I will ever play Threes.
I don't know much about iOS development, but I wonder why a game which is basically a 4x4 grid doesn't work on every single version of iOS. 1024 works just fine.
It's pretty much an effort vs. payoff thing; the dev environment get nicer each iteration, and iOS < 6 is in a fractional minority.
According to a company called Mixpanel Trends [1], iOS 7.x is currently on 89% of all Apple devices. iOS 6 is just under 10% and iOS 5 and before is under 1.5%.
Since you can't downgrade and devices ship with the latest version, that means that anyone running iOS 5 or iOS 6 is also running an older device with lower performance. If you're doing a resource heavy game it may not even run well on those devices even if you did work to support them.
Even finding a way to test software on iOS 5 or 6 is a huge pain. Apple makes it very difficult to test on anything other than the latest version unless you happen to have a device with that OS laying around.