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technically speaking?

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.

2048 is the #1 free app

http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/...

yup. making no money.

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.

It has in-game ads, so it makes no money in the same way that Flappy Bird was free and made no money.

except flappy bird retained users which led to more ad impressions. i guarantee you the retention for 2048 is crap.

Only the web version is ad-free. The iOS version has ads. Its longevity I believe will be greater compared to the Threes game. What makes you think otherwise - that Threes will stay on the top for longer than 2048?

2048 is Solitaire. It's exactly the same kind of game - the algorithm to beating it is dead simple and you win or lose by the whim of the RNG. As per the words of a person who plays Solitaire every day: "I don't play it because it's challenging, I play it because I need to play with something that requires no thinking for a while".

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.

> 2048 is Solitaire. It's exactly the same kind of game - the algorithm to beating it is dead simple and you win or lose by the whim of the RNG.

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).

[1] http://greenfelt.net/spider

[2] http://greenfelt.net/sht

in a word? retention.

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.

I believe the point is that 2048 has less gameplay longevity. Threes is designed to be a puzzle game that will last you the rest of your life, and no one has come close to beating it yet. 2048 can be beaten with relatively simple algorithms, so even though it is easier to pick up because its initial learning curve is shallower, people will max it out sooner.

Some of us don't want a puzzle game that will last the rest of our lives. I want something to get obsessed about for a few weeks, then move on to other things. I'd rather 2048 with its winnability (and beyond - I'm after its 8192 milestone now) than something nigh unto unwinnable.

BTW: I know there's ads on the 2048 iOS app, but don't see them. I'm barely aware of anything when playing.

Which is a shame for both developers, as retention matters more (financially) for an ad-supported game than a for-pay one.

Would it not be fair to say that because 1024 is free it's taking sales away from Threes? They might be doing fine, maybe they deserve to do better.

craftsmanship is not lean.

Man, I really like this comment.

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.)

I think "quality" is the key word here, that ineffable property of refinement and aesthetic care that creates beauty in our experience of something. We'd like to live in a world of quality things, but that isn't always where market forces take us, at least in the short term. The most cynical or economically motivated might even discount the importance of quality, but I think most people just want the market to be more aligned with it in the long term to enable more of what's around us to be a work of art.

This reminds me of the philosophical book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which is all about "Quality" and the difference between "artisitic quality", and "technical/mechanical quality"

I seem to remember the follow up "Lila" talking more about quality. Dynamic and static quality form what I remember.

Yes, exactly! I didn't reference it inline for fear of sounding pretentious.

I've played both games. It's definitely true that 2048 appeared in a world where threes was popular. But it isn't the case that a bunch of effort improved threes over the simpler 2048.

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.

You are missing the point - 2048 was a clone that is free riding on the work done to design Threes.

>It's two very different communities, and it's fun to see the two worlds collide.

...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.

As someone who has done plenty of indie game development, I understand their gripes, but also I know this is the "Game" we're playing here — anyone who makes any form of success should expect to be cloned. Period. So think about that from the get-go and come to peace with it in your strategy/set expectations accordingly. The second I put any app out there I assume it's out in the general "mindspace" and will probably manifest somewhere in another form at some point or another. The speed at which it manifests usually correlates to the popularity of the idea.

> and that they were indeed the first to ship a full, polished game with that concept.

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.

I completely agree. To borrow a common refrain among my group of coworkers: presume goodwill. It's amazing to see the interactions of a group of very effective developers feeling out the finished product as they venture into interesting territory. I'm incredible happy that they posted this!

They shipped the first version. They then decide to ise the term "rip offs" - even though people developing one of the first very popular rip offs claim to have never seen Threes!

Are you referring to 2048?

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."

Which 2048 are you referring to? The creator of the one that hit it off on HN said that they weren't aware of Threes until after it took off [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373927

The very comment you link to says 2048 was based on 1024. And 1024 was indisputably based on Threes.

How does that negate my point?

Your point seems to imply 2048 was not based on Threes. But it was in fact based on something that was based on Threes, which is equivalent.

Ah, I see. Well, my intention was to simply add evidence to the claim that the creator of the well known 2048 didn't know about Threes when he created it. There seemed to be a dispute, so I remembered the comment and linked to it.

The webpage for that 2048 references Threes, so even he is supporting a line of direct influence.

the point is that you cannot download an iOS app without encountering its description, so to say that you know about 1024 and not Threes is deeply suspect.

That is incorrect.

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)

Do you read iOS descriptions of apps you know you're going to download? I sure don't! If I see a friend playing a game that looks good, I download it without reading.

Cirulli explicitly says in that post that the chain of creation was Threes -> 1024 -> Saming's 2048 without animation -> Gabriel Cirulli's 2048.

He says he wasn't aware of Threes, I have no reason to doubt him. If I saw a simple game and wanted to make my own version, I wouldn't do in-depth research of the original game either.

He was cloning 1024 which was explicitly a clone of Threes. I was only pointing out there was a chain there.

You seemed to be implying that he must have known that there was a link between 1024 and Threes and therefore the term rip off was suitable.

He was explicitly copying _something_, in a chain of direct borrowings that goes back to Threes. You seem to be taking issue with the pejorative implications of "rip off" that the original article is using to demarcate the difference between an exact clone and the near-but-different copies we're seeing now.

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".

I think they're implying that the term ripoff is suitable regardless of whether he knew there was a link between 1024 and Threes.

If you are referring to 2048, that’s because it was ripping off 1024, not Threes.

Actually the app copying goes: Threes -> 1024 -> 2048

But, not that I know the situation, it is possible according to your example that 2048 to not be aware of Threes.

Currently my most downvoted post, even though it is factually accurate and contains no opinion.

Still misleading. The 2048 creators may not have known of Threes, but were influenced by it nonetheless. An incomplete fact set imputing malice warrants downvoting.

What malice am I imputing?

One of the clones was amde without being aware of Threes!, other people are using the term "rip off", not me.