Casual Game Dev Union

[DrWilloughby]

I was speculating a bit idly today about how one can keep blatant rip-offs from devaluing IP in casual games (the old clone question again, sorry). I don't see "educating the customer" as a viable solution to this problem. We can't make the gamers care enough about IP to keep them from buying Cake Mania.

Now, I know it would take gargantuan strength to move this stone, but speculate with me, if you will. Doesn't it seem that perhaps the best way to keep the rape of the innovative developer from happening ad infinitum is to have said developers refuse to publish or distribute with portals and publishers that distribute the clones? PlayFirst would certainly like to have a lock on the Diner Dash mechanic, and they aren't gonna get it through patents. Sir Raptis would dearly love to have a lock on the Chuzzle mechanic.

So my question is, have any of the proven devs out there thought about organizing in a manner such as this? Come up with a basic set of guidelines as to what constitutes a "clone" (it would be an arbitrary line to draw) and refuse to publish or distribute with those that violated the rule?

My games are not really the targets of cloning, but it won't stop me from speculating.

And don't bother with the reply of "it will never happen", I know it won't, but isn't it nice to dream?

[Davaris]

PlayFirst would certainly like to have a lock on the Diner Dash mechanic, and they aren't gonna get it through patents.

Huh? Are you saying Diner Dash is original? I thought they ripped off Betty's Beer Bar...
If thats the case, what goes around comes around. :)

[electronicStar]

What do you want to change?
Copying has existed since the birth of videogames and hasn't killed the industry,in the contrary I think it can be a source of betterment and rraah rraah rrahh (noise of old beaten discussion going on...)

[Raptisoft]

Sir Raptis would dearly love to have a lock on the Chuzzle mechanic.

Well... only emotinally. Realistically, I wouldn't go beyond bitching about someone stealing it because, well, we're all pretty much guilty, if you split enough hairs. I got my own start by ripping off Bust-a-Move, though I view it as a lesser crime because Bust-a-Move wasn't in the PC market, and wasn't planning to be. It's more parasitism that gets my goat, but oh well... to be frank, if the clone-daddies had waited a decent six months to a year before ripping off, it wouldn't have bothered me much at all. It was Chuzzle being reskinned and sold within two months that really bugged me-- more the rudeness than anything else.

(Edit) To sum up, really, I'd just like to see more demonstrations of respect in the indie community. Some clones say "you inspired me" others say "gimme summa ya mon-ay!"

[DrWilloughby]

To sum up, really, I'd just like to see more demonstrations of respect in the indie community. Some clones say "you inspired me" others say "gimme summa ya mon-ay!"
He, well an appeal to ethics has worked before... no reason it can't continue to work.

Huh? Are you saying Diner Dash is original? I thought they ripped off Betty's Beer Bar...
My bad. I came a little late to the party on this whole casual gaming thing and I guess I still don't have my history straight. :)

[cliffski]

It *could* work to some extent if portals didnt have in-house teams. If you make game X, portal A sells it, and then sells clone 'Y'. this will annoy you. you can then say the portal wont get your game 'Z'. They just wait to see Z, then get in house guys to clone it for them.

The big problem is making a game thats trivial to clone. I think I've said this before. The claymation games are way harder to clone than a 'normal' game, Cas's games have a very uniqie art style thats probably hard to clone for most people. If you want to insure against cloning, a good bet is to work on bigger, longer-dev-time games that simply arent easy to clone.

Getting back to the topic, I think its good practice anyway not to sell through portals riddled with clones. I think it can almost 'devalue' your game to be seen listed among the BBB clones now. Added to the fact that portal royalty rates and the actual sale price of your game in those circumstances is amazingly low anyway.

[Sakura Games]

Huh? Are you saying Diner Dash is original? I thought they ripped off Betty's Beer Bar...

Yes, as well as Betty ripped the old game for C64 "Tapper". Is fun that not many developers are cloning the old (but good) ideas that you can find in c64 archive or MAME roms... I expect more to come soon.

[tolik]

I got my own start by ripping off Bust-a-Move, though I view it as a lesser crime because Bust-a-Move wasn't in the PC market, and wasn't planning to be.

Do you mean downloadable PC market?

If you are talking about PC CD/past/whatever market

http://www.mobygames.com/search/quick?q=puzzle+bobble&p=3&search=Go
http://www.mobygames.com/search/quick?q=puzzle+bobble&p=2&search=Go

There are certainly more entries missing in mobygames database as I've played BAM2/3 (even CD versions) in DOS times without emulation (as neogeo emulation didn't exist at that time).

[Raptisoft]

If you are talking about PC CD/past/whatever market

Wow... at the time (Eggsucker days) I was doing internet searches like crazy, trying to find BAM for my wife to play. In fact, the only reason I wrote Eggsucker was because we couldn't find one, and she loved the game. That's why Eggsucker was only $5, because I felt so sheepish about stealing someone's mechanic. :)

[Fabio]

I think that all this complaining about clones is plain stupid: every game is a clone of some other game (that maybe you never heard) more or less evolved into a new direction.

I think that on Earth only Savant doesn't realize this at all, if a certainly intelligent person like Carmack bothered about cloning and moaned and whined all the day in Savant style, then we would not have got any game after the original pre-Doom Wolfenstein, just like we haven't yet seen any Savant game but he doesn't miss a chance to turn every other thread into yet-another-Clone-is-evil rant, showing no coherence then when he promotes "best game" a Marble Maddness CLONE, or even worse turns every other thread into stupid senseless personal attacks like this (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showpost.php?p=95135&postcount=22) (that, by the way, also caused the otherwise useless creation this post, useless as much as the anti-Clones whining, that brings nowhere).
Instead a smart person like Carmack is always ahead his competitors.. and released plenty of games (and even more after licensing his work). Savant: where are your games I ask? Whine, whine, whine.. but where are your damn games? Can you say R-E-T-A-I-L like I did in 1995 and beyond?

I think we should call this the "Savant factor" - a measure of the amount of time before any thread with the word "Clone" in it devolves into this inane crap.

[cliffski]

I disagree. Diner Dash is just a blatant reskin of Bettys Beer Bar. I think thats wrong, I think it shows a total lack of original ideas, and should strongly be discouraged.
I remember tapper, the interface layout was very very different to BBB as I recall. it was maybe inspired by tapper, a game from many many years before, but there was obviously good GUI design and gameplay thought put into it.
There are far too many people who knock out cheap clones in this industry, and then they whine about "no game is truly original". Fine. Lets agree on trying to be at least 1% original shall we?
Maybe you wish that Carmack had just done a reskin of pacman, and not bothered designing wolfenstein at all?

[Nexic]

You have to remember that there are tons of developers, and only a handful of them hang around indiegamer. Even if everyone who frequents here boycotted Bigfish I'd hassard a guess they'd still manage 1 game a day without much trouble.

You also have to realise that a large number of the developers out there are making just the kind of game you want to stop, so we'd end up with less than 30 small time or non-portal friendly developers, that wouldn't have much leverage anyway, since the portals love the top cloners. I'm not saying innovative games don't make money, but I am saying the sum total of all clones/reskins make a much higher % of each portal's profits than the sum of the original ones.

I think the only real way to stop cloning is to literally pay developers not to do one!

[Fabio]

Maybe you wish that Carmack had just done a reskin of pacman, and not bothered designing wolfenstein at all? I'm all for originality, but I reckon that we live in a wannabe free-market and thus we've to accept its rules. If buyers want clones, then that's a very sad thing but it's also reality. Maybe they just can't have enough of that kind of game. It's like fashion and trends. I don't like them but it's how reality proves to be.
It's very bad when something actively pushes towards clones (e.g. portals refusing original games because "too risky"), but what can we really do, concretely?
While a Devs Union would be a good thing to create, I think there are more important actions it should take than trying to defeat cloning, expecially since the buyers seem to promote/encourage it (if we are in this situation is because buyers ignored more and more original/deep games in favour of the yet-another-clone).
You can educate the buyers, you can impress them with some original ideas, but I don't think you can drive them away too much from their ignorance (or legitimate will for always the same soup? maybe we should be less presumptuous and accept the buyers' tastes. They are the judges after all, otherwise don't even wish to sell your game but play it alone, no?).

[Fabio]

[ggambett : Edited out more flame stuff]
Where's that killfile/ignore function on this board?

[Nauris]

Hallo, de-rail :) Savant is not even mentioned until Fabio comes along. You guys should duke it out in private, methinks. Its amazing that it takes only ten posts to go from Andy`s original point to discussion about Savant`s intelligence and whatever.

[ggambett]

Savant, Fabio : stop it. I had to delete 13 posts in this thread. If you want to have a personal, teenager-level insult competition, please do it in private.

Where's that killfile/ignore function on this board? Open the user's profile, click the "Add <user> to your ignore list" near the top.

[Sakura Games]

While I don't agree at all Fabio's point of view vs Microsoft, I admit that I'm quite surprised that the moderators never took action with Savant.
Come on, is ridiculous. Every new game announcement is spammed by him with the usual (useless) stupid post "that game is a clone of XXX".
I think that his real goal is to make the serious devs flee from those boards, and indeed I see the big ones posting less and less.

But since moderators doesn't say anything, I guess they're happy that this forums has become a sort of spam board, a sort of playfield for teenagers 16-years old with only one goal "Make a mess" - "insult everyone" - "contribute NOTHING".

[Fabio]

Savant, Fabio : stop it. I had to delete 13 posts in this thread. If you want to have a personal, teenager-level insult competition, please do it in private. Believe me, I don't wanna have it neither in private, at all. I wish I didn't exist for him, but from time to time it doesn't seem so (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showpost.php?p=95135&postcount=22). I refrained lotsa times to answer his senseless posts when he with big hypocrisy attacks others' games, to avoid such flame wars, but he has clearly another attitude.

Open the user's profile, click the "Add <user> to your ignore list" near the top. Thank you.

[yanuart]

Well I don't know if my opinion matters but I do have some productive time to waste. So here we go back to the topic :)

All businesses in this world suffer with this problem, especially where creativity involves. Movies, literatures, musics, software you just name it. I'm not going to rambling about what should I/you do or don't cause I'm nowhere worthy of it but it really takes time for the whole thing to grow itself into a state of matureness.
As in those fields I mentioned above, all of them have become a stable industry and have room for everyone and breakthrough even with many years of ups and downs.

Oh and about clone standardization/generalization rules, I think it'll be more of a witch hunt kinda thing. Do you really want to start it ?

[RedKnight]

... blah blah blah blah blah blah

like every indie game is "ORIGINAL"

[DrWilloughby]

Sorry to the mods to have touched off a flame war-

In any case, I think cliffsky (as usual, damn him) has some great points above:

The big problem is making a game thats trivial to clone. I think I've said this before. The claymation games are way harder to clone than a 'normal' game, Cas's games have a very uniqie art style thats probably hard to clone for most people. If you want to insure against cloning, a good bet is to work on bigger, longer-dev-time games that simply arent easy to clone.
This is the route I've gone down. It would be easy to steal my themes but difficult to steal my gameplay. With most of the cloned games, it's the reverse. The problem is that this increases barrier of entry in most cases. Interesting that the two examples he cites, though, are unique and "unclonable" because of their art style, not their gameplay. He's probably too modest to mention his game, but Democracy is one which would be hard to clone gameplay-wise, while I don't think he needs to worry about someone trying to clone it from an art perspective ;)

Getting back to the topic, I think its good practice anyway not to sell through portals riddled with clones. I think it can almost 'devalue' your game to be seen listed among the BBB clones now. Added to the fact that portal royalty rates and the actual sale price of your game in those circumstances is amazingly low anyway.This is really the end point of the whole discussion for me. In general, a basic ethical code of not supporting the system that doesn't value that which is important to me is the solution. I hope that others share it as well.

[Anthony Flack]

Betty ripped the old game for C64 "Tapper". Is fun that not many developers are cloning the old (but good) ideas that you can find in c64 archive or MAME roms... I expect more to come soon.

I know this was already adressed, but I've seen it mentioned a few times before - and Betty's Beer Bar has very little in common with Tapper, except for similarities in theme. They play completely differently.

As for the main idea - well, it was at least a couple of years ago that I proposed that we collectively took a disapproving attitude towards blatant cloning before the whole business ended up eating itself. I'm against the idea of getting lawyers involved, so my proposal was simply that we maintain an attitude that it's unsporting, in the hope that we could at least have some mitigating influence. Hardly a draconian solution there - but at the time, most people were praising game cloning as good ol' entrepeneurial spirit, and I was a grumpy old so-and-so.

But that was back when there was still hope that we could collectively build a vibrant and creative alternative to the mainstream. Now, I don't really care. It's far too late for that. Perhaps this was all inevitable, but not many people seemed too bothered at the time.

[Sakura Games]

But that was back when there was still hope that we could collectively build a vibrant and creative alternative to the mainstream. Now, I don't really care. It's far too late for that. Perhaps this was all inevitable, but not many people seemed too bothered at the time.
Yes true... well I think it was really inevitable. Nowadays the golden days are over, the online market is quite similar to retail one, and everyone who tells that you can get rich quickly making online games is telling you a lot of BULL**** :(

[cliffski]

change can still happen. the portals havent been all abd, they have persuaded hundreds of thousands of people that buying a game online and downlaoding it is normal, fun, reliable and safe.
You now need to sell to those people.
So the plan is, we make high quality, innovative and interesting games...
and we DONT put them on portals.
In a perfect world, eventually the portal customers will end up bitching on the portals forums about why all the 'good' games never seem to be on the portals anymore. Maybe in the long term, the balance of power will shift and portal deals will become more attractive.
I know a lot of people think this will never happen, but it wont take *that* many established indies going that route before it makes a difference.
I have 2 small portal deals, 1 of which is maybe 6 or 7 years old. It brings in as much as about a thirtieth of my direct sales each month.

[Pyabo]

Let's forget about clones for a minute... I think the primary benefit of a union of indie developers would be the bigger negotiating power with portals. You might be able to eventually raise the standard commision rate from RealArcade, for instance. You *know* they are making a lot more money off your game than you are.

[impossible]

I disagree. Diner Dash is just a blatant reskin of Bettys Beer Bar. I don't really see why people are always saying this, besides the obvious "ggambet is a member of indiegamer and was wronged!"

The two games are imo very different. Sure on a high level they are both games about serving stuff... but its kind of like saying Collapse is a blatant reskin of Tetris because they both have blocks in them.

[RohoMech]

Yea...BBB is really more like a rail shooter, people in come, you click on them...done!

Diner Dash, its about memorizing timings, so its closer to an rts in that fashion

I don't really see why people are always saying this, besides the obvious "ggambet is a member of indiegamer and was wronged!"

The two games are imo very different. Sure on a high level they are both games about serving stuff... but its kind of like saying Collapse is a blatant reskin of Tetris because they both have blocks in them.

[ggambett]

I don't really see why people are always saying this
I don't say it myself. It was a surprise when DD came out about a year after BBB. However the games are different enough, especially considering the DD clones that came afterwards. DD also sold a lot more than BBB so GameLab clearly did some right things that we didn't - not surprising considering BBB was our second game ever (ie nobody in Mystery had any previous game dev experience). I've talked about this with GameLab, they say DD was in alpha when they first heard of BBB, and I don't have reasons to not believe them. It doesn't matter, anyway. We don't feel wronged.

[arcadetown]

Oh boy... another clone discussion. We haven't pounded this one to death here already have we. Closed.