12 ms·

Clone culture and its continuous impact on indie developers

90 points by amichail 5y ago

pyb 5y ago
This is also the case in the startup world. As we saw recently, any tool that begins to take off gets cloned incredibly quickly (Airtable, Roam...). Given the apparent shortage, it goes to show that ideas actually matter.
- ushakov 5y ago
  devils advocate here to be honest, expensive, proprietary tools like Airtable, Notion, Retool deserve to be copied why would you pour significant resources into something that one day can and probably will disappear, cancelled or priced out?
  - JonAtkinson 5y ago
    Because in the current environment it's easy to leverage VC money to stay just-ahead in the user-acquisition race, while the early employees extract very nice salaries and build their networks -- which they can use to find their next role when the gravy train ends. It really doesn't matter a bit if the product survives in the marketplace or not. It just needs to 'succeed' in the short term.
    - ushakov 5y ago
      all these companies are going to die as soon as they run out of VC-money or can't sustain the growth to get new money VC-startups are glorified MLMs for early employees and investors
      - _zllx 5y ago
        Those are all okay because they don't use an openly replicated linked list with byzantine fault tolerance. The ones using an openly replicated linked list with byzantine fault tolerance are the only ones that should be subject to scrutiny and public fits of outrage. If they are using PostgreSQL on AWS, there is no issue.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    I think when criticizing paid software, and paid SaaS, it's a mistake to think their alternative is logically open-source software. It's actually ad-driven software, because a profitable paid service has to provide much more to you than just the code like open-source does, and that costs money. I relish tools that just let me pay for them and cut out the middle-man. The idea that all software should be free has contributed to the hyper commercialized, invasive, ad-funded internet we have now.
quadcore 5y ago
Most people in the game industry dont get this: games are, economically, startups (innovative high-growth product), they are not content - like movies. So you have a few killer games and armies of clones which often make their author poor or barely even. In other words, if you are a game developper, you need to figure out why your product will be a high growth product. You should not treat it as an art exercise (if you wanna succeed economically). For example, the art style of world of warcraft is not like it is because that was the art style of the art director (well it is but) they did it like this because they knew this was the kind of art that is needed for a high growth product. Everything in world of warcraft (its just an example) has been done to reach high growth, they werent doing an art exercise that happen to be successful. Its a mindset most game developers wont ever get. Of course you can do art exercises and be lucky. Just be conscious youre playing at the lotery though.
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  Aren't (commercial) movies the same though? The decisions are made by producers, and their main task is to figure out how to make the movie appealing to the largest possible audience, so that investors will get maximum RoI.
  - quadcore 5y ago
    I know this is difficult to get but people watch a movie and then watch another one. They dont do that with games (not in an economically significant way). People spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on one game. They spend their life on 2-3 games. Its a product, not content.
    - chayleaf 5y ago
      I really don't think so. It might be true for sandboxes which draw players in by letting them create new objectives for themselves, or competitive games with high time investment requirements, but it's definitely not true for linear singleplayer games, and in my experience most games are like that.
    - 5y ago
TrianguloY 5y ago
I've suffered from this cloning culture (for those who find strange the 'culture' part, it's because in some countries cloning something successful is an achievement that apparently is rewarded). Personally I don't mind clones, ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone, you want to make a better packing game? Ok, go on. But use your own assets, situations, music, etc. Cloning something to try to trick users into thinking yours is the real one is just despicable. And if you don't give credit or even monetize what isn't yours...please consider your life choices.
- bartwe 5y ago
  Why would the music and style be treated as more special than the concept of the game ?
  - krapp 5y ago
    Assets and production are what differentiate one game from another. "Concept" more often than not is just a genre marker.
  - TrianguloY 5y ago
    They shouldn't, but the complexity required to be considered different is usually less. For example you probably wouldn't say that Crash bandicot is a clone of Mario Bros, even though both are 2d platformers. But for music or images even if they are only half the same they feel like clones. Also depends on how 'concept' is defined. Two games where you "unpack things" can be vastly different, but two games where "you unpack things from a packing box and place them on small diorama-like rooms without any objective" is hard to differentiate. All assets have degrees of genres (platform/shooter/..., rap/classic/..., pixelart/medieval/...). But the amount of things you need to change in order to create an "original work" is not the same for all of them.
    - falcor84 5y ago
      >For example you probably wouldn't say that Crash bandicot[sic] is a clone of Mario Bros, even though both are 2d platformers. Ehm, I don't know whether this supports or hurts your argument, but Crash Bandicoot is 3d (or at least 2.5d) and has an entirely different type of gameplay than either the 2d or the 3d Mario games.
nkrisc 5y ago
Barring actual fraud and wholesale theft of art assets, if your idea is copied so easily and consumers apparently can’t team the difference between your game and a clone, do you really have a viable product or were you just the first person to think of an easily commoditized idea? Games that endure usually have something unique about then that resonates with consumers, despite the existence of clones. That might be the characters, the story, that intangible touch of the original artist some game clone sweatshop can’t replicate. You can get a burger anywhere, but I bet every city has at least one burger place that just makes it better, the atmosphere is better, the beer menu better, and there’s always a line out the door. Are games really any different? The example at the beginning of the article looks like it’s different art in the same style. But if it’s a game and not an actual scam, so what? This part confused me though: Clones impact small developers in more than one way, but the most direct consequence for Witch Beam was a rise in confused players which in turn can grow into bad PR for the studio and its staff being overwhelmed by demands. "People were going to our website and being confused, thinking that this is part of the sign-up process to play the game through this app that they got, and signing up to our mailing list thinking that they're signing up to play the game," Brier explains. "We were just flooded with mailing list sign-ups, which then brought us up a tier on Mailchimp, for these low-quality subscribers. And they're low quality because they don't want to be subscribers, and they might even mark us as spam if they get our emails. Where were these confused players coming from? Sounds like the site was designed poorly from a UX perspective.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  I agree, games are the same. The problem is that solo indie doesn't work well in any medium. Everything worth doing benefits from having team members. I think novelists are the closest to still doing things solo, but they still have publishers, editors, beta readers, proofreaders, sensitivity readers, people who check their research if they care about historical accuracy, etc. I think there was a slow-motion bubble from maybe the 1980s until the 2010s where solo indie game dev worked because: - Video games were hard to make - Computers were hard to use - The tools sucked - Almost nobody knew how to program So if you were a smart person who could program half-decently, you had the makings of a game. Now the world is better, and the solo style is left behind. I don't know much about music, but I speculate musicians would say the same. You might be able to play a bunch of instruments, do your own mixing, publish yourself on Bandcamp and whatever, but dollar for dollar most of the industry is singers who don't write their own songs, backup dancers with no names, and session musicians who are in the studio when the recording is done. Calling it "clone culture" misses the point: Games are easy to make now. Indie dev is probably never going to be as hip as when Braid came out. And even Jon Blow didn't do it solo, he bought the music and I think contracted an artist for Braid. Specialization works, scale works.
egypturnash 5y ago
Fragmented platforms ain’t helping. I decided to finally check out this game (I had a good time with Witch Beam’s first one but this just does not interest me much) and discovered it doesn’t seem to be on the iPad I’m typing this on despite it looking like a total natural for that. It’s on Steam, the Switch, and the Xbox. It is at least available on the Mac via Steam but I would have not been at all surprised if it was Windows only, which would have meant I own nothing that could play it, despite it probably being built in a framework (their previous game was in Unity) that easily exports to the iOS tablets in my hand and the PS4 in my living room. This is likely due to them signing exclusivity deals that got them money to finish making the game on, but it creates a distinct hole that clones fill, the same way there were a thousand Pac-Man clones on the home computers and games of the eighties. I don’t want to blame the victim here but this kind of feels like I am. It’s a huge goddamn mess that’s as much the fault of the companies running huge centralized app stores with moderation guidelines that are, in this case, way too loose. Or are exactly as loose as they can legally get away with; see the part where Google Play’s reaction to a game that was clearly a traceover of Unpacking was basically “we will do nothing, go get your own lawyers and fight it out in court”. I would say maybe “lawyers” and “someone to hassle with takedown notices while Witch Beam gets on with their next game” is a thing their publisher should be doing, but they seem to be self-publishing. Which is a whole giant pile of stress that I’ve been through with comics, turns out publishers do a lot of boring bullshit for you that’s maybe worth their cut so you can get on with making the thing you’re good at making. Vlambeer hooked up with Devolver after Ridiculous Fishing, hopefully Witch Beam will find a similar indie-focused publisher to help with this stuff soon.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
If you're afraid of clones, your game isn't good enough, simple as that
- Nevermark 5y ago
  It isn't as simple as that. New ideas that are valuable to the market are by definition worth rewarding so that more of them get created. Some valuable ideas, however, have difficulty translating release into reward simply because despite their originality and value to society, they are easily copied. This creates a problem for everyone. Something we all benefit from encouraging, and that pays for itself (in terms of value that it creates), is being disincentivized. To overcome this hurdle, and achieve a higher economic maxima for both creators and consumers, we have limited (in scope and time) protections for different kinds of valuable but easily copied ideas: patents, trademarks, trade secret, and copyright. Any situation where valuable creations are being disincentivized, is worth consideration of whether that situation could be changed to everyone's benefit.
  - jker 5y ago
    Thank you for this. It’s helpful to have a rational, reasonable treatment of intellectual property protection that avoids both extremes of “all information wants to be free” and “piracy is theft.”
    - the_af 5y ago
      I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but creating a clone of a game is completely unrelated to game piracy, and so neither of the extremes you mentioned would apply. They belong in a completely different debate.
  - nekcihc 5y ago
    Mobile market has created wide access that was not something available to game devs in past - that's why there were game publishers. The speed of gaining market also is significantly faster. So, when devs complain about market speed slowing down - it is not because of clones. Clones apparently are appealing to completelly different market segment, than what "original" aimed at. It is erroneous to assume, that it was their market in first place! Ideas are sh!t and means nothing! If you have an idea - that means, that someone else(in counts of 100s or 1000s) have the same idea already, or someone else in past had that idea. There has been examples of similar products developed independently at the same time, so they might have looked like clones but they are not always clones. So, claiming that ideas are unique and should be somewhat appropriately rewarded... phew! I can relate to the frustrations that are described in article, but at the same time I can't understand if the people that complain have no brains, if they had not foreseen this outcome and did not calculated for how long they will get profit from their product - which was not forever in the first place!!! PS If you are an indie developer, you should educate yourself at least in basic level of marketing, law and business. And after that decide if indie development is for you and if you have a killing insticts of a shark or you are going to be food.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
This is just noted sleazeball Rami Ismail and his insider indiedev buddies trying to protect their profits
shkkmo 5y ago
While I understand the pain of developers who get their projects cloned, I think bit is a bad idea to make the platforms the arbitrators of intellectual property, especially when it isn't clear what the legal decision would be. While there are complete ripoffs that should clearly be removed, there are also iterative clones that steal some ideas and improve on others. This iterative cloning process has lead to some of the best games ever made and we should be careful about limiting them. If the indie developer's only reasonable recourse is to petition platforms, we need to reform the laws about to allow indie developer's a realistic and economically feasible route to address clones within the court system.
eezurr 5y ago
A part of me wishes for a video game crash to happen again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 But it wont, because most video games are no longer tied to physical products. It takes very little effort to purchase and delete video games now, and they take up 0 physical space. And, there isn't a new technology to replace the current mediums. They are also much cheaper compared to then. It was an interesting time in video game history though because the video game market in 1983 became saturated with low quality games and clones because Atari did not enforce any control over 3rd party studios/publishers. People lost trust in product quality and stopped purchasing games. There was a 97% drop in revenue. !!! (not a typo) Then Nintendo swooped in several years later and enforced quality control. Recently I heard the Nintendo Switch is opening the doors to 3rd party developers. I think Unity already has a module for creating games for the switch, so the flood is coming, if it hasn't already. My point is I'm sad to see everything go way of the internet. Procurement is dying and yet is necessary for quality. There's no enforcement in the Android store (and partially the the App Store) per the article. Steam opened its doors to everyone years ago and there are hundreds (or thousands?)* of new games added every day to steam. I believe they changed their algorithm to match games based on sales, not similarity (which makes sense, except my particular favorite genres don't have a lot of competition, so I really have to dig deep to find similar games). Haha.. maybe I'm just getting old. I just dont want to have to put effort into finding quality products. It's such a waste of time to go pioneering. Edit: *Correction, it's 100-200 a week, not per day.
- telchior 5y ago
  There's undoubtedly a flood of trash. But lower barriers to building games isn't making the game industry worse. Somewhat strained metaphor here, but think of energy. Cheap power generation helped the Industrial Revolution along and caused a ton of awful, smoke belching factories to pop up, and a lot of people hated that. But cheap electricity is also the bedrock of every innovation since (including the type HN likes). Easier accessibility to whatever resource always generates crap, but that crap always contains a percentage of treasure. And there's a lot of really, really good stuff hidden away on Steam that wouldn't exist without the easier tools we have today.
- 5y ago
jonplackett 5y ago
It’s not just games it’s everything. I made (i think) the first automatic face swap app back in 2012 when face detection first appeared in iOS. It did pretty well, got into the top 10 around the world. #1 for a bit. Made me some money. But there were tonnes of copies. One guy even flew over to meet me first from SF and said he wanted to buy the app. Offered me half a million dollars. Then when I said yes cut it to half that after he spoke to ‘the board’. Then said half that again - at which point I told him to go F himself - he’d also added into the contract I had to take the app offline and send him the source code for them to review before finalising, which would have ruined the purely viral growth. Within 2 weeks he had launched a virtually identical app - and I mean identical. Just a different name and icon. The entire UI was copied down to the smallest detail. So obviously he’d been working on it before I said no. I think this was his plan all along. To copy my app and use the potential buy out as distraction / disruption. He then sent me a really angry email with the choice line “if someone offer/ you a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat”.
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  I’m sorry he wasted your time, but I found this really funny. Thanks for sharing. What was the fate for either app?
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    I also find it pretty funny now! Very glad I didn’t get mixed up with him in the end! It makes a funny story at least Mine is still online: facejuggler.com (though obviously very outdated now) I’m not sure what happened to his and all the others. There are so many copies now it’s hard to know.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- whiskyant 5y ago
  >“if someone offer/ you a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat” That analogy only makes sense if he offered you equity, haha.
m0llusk 5y ago
With a pay to release model only previews are initially available and only when enough money is pledged for release is the full product made available. This is not a trivial model to adopt, but it holds promise for doing business without being at the mercy of copies. There are also many ways of adding value and capturing customer attentions. Community support and forums where people can find and share tutorials and extensions and come together for conversation and shared game play can add a great deal and keep customers coming to producers for more. This is especially true if there are ways of voting or making purchases that direct the course of ongoing development. Currently management of customer relations and engagement is not integrated with the development and vending of most games. Sure there is some marketing and promotions, but full community support and development is more than that. It may seem that being able to lock down so called intellectual property extends value for creators and thus the larger community, but there is also an argument to be made that all this focus on ownership and protection of ideas dulls and slows down every aspect of development.
baud147258 5y ago
well, the lesson here seems to be to avoid targeting mobile platforms. And even then if your game is so simple it can be cloned even before release, maybe it's just there's an oversupply of game/gamedevs and the market will correct itself (or not and artists will continue to produce art, even at a loss)
deleted 5y ago
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brandonmenc 5y ago
Games are now like music. Selling music is a ship that has sailed. Decades ago. It seems the same thing is happening to - among other things - indie games Maybe you can get some donations, but that's about it. That's just the way it is now. It's still a million times better than the shareware days though. Back then, someone developing a passion project game could never dream of being able to reach a global audience and also take no-cost friction-free global payments from them. For every Apogee there were many orders of magnitude more developers who would have loved to pocket even a thousand dollars with their game. As with music, there is this imo strange idea among niche independent creators that they should be able to just get paid like a Hollywood star for making something that lots of other people are making. Do it because you enjoy it and be happy when you can collect four or five digits of cash, because the alternative is zero audience and zero money. And it always has been.
the_af 5y ago
I understand this is demoralizing and infuriating for indie devs. And indie devs are the kind of devs I want to support, so I really side with them. That said, for me this is the real insight (said by a dev from Vlambeer): > "Ultimately, the big question is: what can you do to combat clones? And in reality there's not a whole lot you can do. Or what you can do could legally jeopardise how game development works for future generations." > "If flying in a game was protected, then Luftrausers wouldn't exist" Ultimately almost every act of creativity has some core of... let's not call it stealing, let's call it "creative borrowing without asking for permission". That's how it works, authors take from what has come before. If, trying to protect indie devs from annoying copycats, we end up enforcing a draconian system, only lawyers will be happy.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
> Ultimately, the big question is: what can you do to combat clones? And in reality there's not a whole lot you can do. Of course there is. Get good. Make better games. It matters not if someone else reimplements your idea with inferior execution. If you're better at it than they are, your game is the better "clone" and celebrated for it. Even better: Make something so crazy that nobody can successfully copy it even it they try, because they can't figure out what makes it work.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  > Of course there is. Get good. Make better games. That was kind of the article's point. If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours). Especially if you haven't released on all platforms right away, which is extremely difficult to pull off. And if you market it at all, there could be clones out there before your game is even finished and out there, because you're busy trying to make something good and they're just rushing to get something that looks like the screenshot out there as soon as possible. > Even better: Make something so crazy that nobody can successfully copy it even it they try, because they can't figure out what makes it work. So spend 7 years working full-time with employees using money made from a previously successful game to make something like The Witness. Got it. Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    > If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours). Name it the same as an internet domain you control. Now you hold the keys to the name. > Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that. In other words, a fantastic niche to those who can.
  - TillE 5y ago
    > If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly How? How on earth are you going to clone a game like Stardew Valley, or Disco Elysium, or Factorio, or No Man's Sky, or Subnautica, or etc etc etc of actual good PC indie games? You're not, not without an enormous amount of effort. This stuff pretty much only happens to very simple mobile games. When you're talking about actual meaty games, crappy clones are very easily recognized as such.
scotty79 5y ago
Stores should just group games by similarity and order them by date in search results.

90 points by amichail 5y ago

pyb 5y ago

This is also the case in the startup world. As we saw recently, any tool that begins to take off gets cloned incredibly quickly (Airtable, Roam...). Given the apparent shortage, it goes to show that ideas actually matter.

ushakov 5y ago
devils advocate here to be honest, expensive, proprietary tools like Airtable, Notion, Retool deserve to be copied why would you pour significant resources into something that one day can and probably will disappear, cancelled or priced out?
- JonAtkinson 5y ago
  Because in the current environment it's easy to leverage VC money to stay just-ahead in the user-acquisition race, while the early employees extract very nice salaries and build their networks -- which they can use to find their next role when the gravy train ends. It really doesn't matter a bit if the product survives in the marketplace or not. It just needs to 'succeed' in the short term.
  - ushakov 5y ago
    all these companies are going to die as soon as they run out of VC-money or can't sustain the growth to get new money VC-startups are glorified MLMs for early employees and investors
    - _zllx 5y ago
      Those are all okay because they don't use an openly replicated linked list with byzantine fault tolerance. The ones using an openly replicated linked list with byzantine fault tolerance are the only ones that should be subject to scrutiny and public fits of outrage. If they are using PostgreSQL on AWS, there is no issue.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I think when criticizing paid software, and paid SaaS, it's a mistake to think their alternative is logically open-source software. It's actually ad-driven software, because a profitable paid service has to provide much more to you than just the code like open-source does, and that costs money. I relish tools that just let me pay for them and cut out the middle-man. The idea that all software should be free has contributed to the hyper commercialized, invasive, ad-funded internet we have now.

quadcore 5y ago

Most people in the game industry dont get this: games are, economically, startups (innovative high-growth product), they are not content - like movies. So you have a few killer games and armies of clones which often make their author poor or barely even. In other words, if you are a game developper, you need to figure out why your product will be a high growth product. You should not treat it as an art exercise (if you wanna succeed economically). For example, the art style of world of warcraft is not like it is because that was the art style of the art director (well it is but) they did it like this because they knew this was the kind of art that is needed for a high growth product. Everything in world of warcraft (its just an example) has been done to reach high growth, they werent doing an art exercise that happen to be successful. Its a mindset most game developers wont ever get. Of course you can do art exercises and be lucky. Just be conscious youre playing at the lotery though.

burntoutfire 5y ago
Aren't (commercial) movies the same though? The decisions are made by producers, and their main task is to figure out how to make the movie appealing to the largest possible audience, so that investors will get maximum RoI.
- quadcore 5y ago
  I know this is difficult to get but people watch a movie and then watch another one. They dont do that with games (not in an economically significant way). People spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on one game. They spend their life on 2-3 games. Its a product, not content.
  - chayleaf 5y ago
    I really don't think so. It might be true for sandboxes which draw players in by letting them create new objectives for themselves, or competitive games with high time investment requirements, but it's definitely not true for linear singleplayer games, and in my experience most games are like that.
  - 5y ago

TrianguloY 5y ago

I've suffered from this cloning culture (for those who find strange the 'culture' part, it's because in some countries cloning something successful is an achievement that apparently is rewarded). Personally I don't mind clones, ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone, you want to make a better packing game? Ok, go on. But use your own assets, situations, music, etc. Cloning something to try to trick users into thinking yours is the real one is just despicable. And if you don't give credit or even monetize what isn't yours...please consider your life choices.

bartwe 5y ago
Why would the music and style be treated as more special than the concept of the game ?
- krapp 5y ago
  Assets and production are what differentiate one game from another. "Concept" more often than not is just a genre marker.
- TrianguloY 5y ago
  They shouldn't, but the complexity required to be considered different is usually less. For example you probably wouldn't say that Crash bandicot is a clone of Mario Bros, even though both are 2d platformers. But for music or images even if they are only half the same they feel like clones. Also depends on how 'concept' is defined. Two games where you "unpack things" can be vastly different, but two games where "you unpack things from a packing box and place them on small diorama-like rooms without any objective" is hard to differentiate. All assets have degrees of genres (platform/shooter/..., rap/classic/..., pixelart/medieval/...). But the amount of things you need to change in order to create an "original work" is not the same for all of them.
  - falcor84 5y ago
    >For example you probably wouldn't say that Crash bandicot[sic] is a clone of Mario Bros, even though both are 2d platformers. Ehm, I don't know whether this supports or hurts your argument, but Crash Bandicoot is 3d (or at least 2.5d) and has an entirely different type of gameplay than either the 2d or the 3d Mario games.

nkrisc 5y ago

Barring actual fraud and wholesale theft of art assets, if your idea is copied so easily and consumers apparently can’t team the difference between your game and a clone, do you really have a viable product or were you just the first person to think of an easily commoditized idea? Games that endure usually have something unique about then that resonates with consumers, despite the existence of clones. That might be the characters, the story, that intangible touch of the original artist some game clone sweatshop can’t replicate. You can get a burger anywhere, but I bet every city has at least one burger place that just makes it better, the atmosphere is better, the beer menu better, and there’s always a line out the door. Are games really any different? The example at the beginning of the article looks like it’s different art in the same style. But if it’s a game and not an actual scam, so what? This part confused me though: Clones impact small developers in more than one way, but the most direct consequence for Witch Beam was a rise in confused players which in turn can grow into bad PR for the studio and its staff being overwhelmed by demands. "People were going to our website and being confused, thinking that this is part of the sign-up process to play the game through this app that they got, and signing up to our mailing list thinking that they're signing up to play the game," Brier explains. "We were just flooded with mailing list sign-ups, which then brought us up a tier on Mailchimp, for these low-quality subscribers. And they're low quality because they don't want to be subscribers, and they might even mark us as spam if they get our emails. Where were these confused players coming from? Sounds like the site was designed poorly from a UX perspective.

ReactiveJelly 5y ago
I agree, games are the same. The problem is that solo indie doesn't work well in any medium. Everything worth doing benefits from having team members. I think novelists are the closest to still doing things solo, but they still have publishers, editors, beta readers, proofreaders, sensitivity readers, people who check their research if they care about historical accuracy, etc. I think there was a slow-motion bubble from maybe the 1980s until the 2010s where solo indie game dev worked because: - Video games were hard to make - Computers were hard to use - The tools sucked - Almost nobody knew how to program So if you were a smart person who could program half-decently, you had the makings of a game. Now the world is better, and the solo style is left behind. I don't know much about music, but I speculate musicians would say the same. You might be able to play a bunch of instruments, do your own mixing, publish yourself on Bandcamp and whatever, but dollar for dollar most of the industry is singers who don't write their own songs, backup dancers with no names, and session musicians who are in the studio when the recording is done. Calling it "clone culture" misses the point: Games are easy to make now. Indie dev is probably never going to be as hip as when Braid came out. And even Jon Blow didn't do it solo, he bought the music and I think contracted an artist for Braid. Specialization works, scale works.

egypturnash 5y ago

Fragmented platforms ain’t helping. I decided to finally check out this game (I had a good time with Witch Beam’s first one but this just does not interest me much) and discovered it doesn’t seem to be on the iPad I’m typing this on despite it looking like a total natural for that. It’s on Steam, the Switch, and the Xbox. It is at least available on the Mac via Steam but I would have not been at all surprised if it was Windows only, which would have meant I own nothing that could play it, despite it probably being built in a framework (their previous game was in Unity) that easily exports to the iOS tablets in my hand and the PS4 in my living room. This is likely due to them signing exclusivity deals that got them money to finish making the game on, but it creates a distinct hole that clones fill, the same way there were a thousand Pac-Man clones on the home computers and games of the eighties. I don’t want to blame the victim here but this kind of feels like I am. It’s a huge goddamn mess that’s as much the fault of the companies running huge centralized app stores with moderation guidelines that are, in this case, way too loose. Or are exactly as loose as they can legally get away with; see the part where Google Play’s reaction to a game that was clearly a traceover of Unpacking was basically “we will do nothing, go get your own lawyers and fight it out in court”. I would say maybe “lawyers” and “someone to hassle with takedown notices while Witch Beam gets on with their next game” is a thing their publisher should be doing, but they seem to be self-publishing. Which is a whole giant pile of stress that I’ve been through with comics, turns out publishers do a lot of boring bullshit for you that’s maybe worth their cut so you can get on with making the thing you’re good at making. Vlambeer hooked up with Devolver after Ridiculous Fishing, hopefully Witch Beam will find a similar indie-focused publisher to help with this stuff soon.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

If you're afraid of clones, your game isn't good enough, simple as that

Nevermark 5y ago
It isn't as simple as that. New ideas that are valuable to the market are by definition worth rewarding so that more of them get created. Some valuable ideas, however, have difficulty translating release into reward simply because despite their originality and value to society, they are easily copied. This creates a problem for everyone. Something we all benefit from encouraging, and that pays for itself (in terms of value that it creates), is being disincentivized. To overcome this hurdle, and achieve a higher economic maxima for both creators and consumers, we have limited (in scope and time) protections for different kinds of valuable but easily copied ideas: patents, trademarks, trade secret, and copyright. Any situation where valuable creations are being disincentivized, is worth consideration of whether that situation could be changed to everyone's benefit.
- jker 5y ago
  Thank you for this. It’s helpful to have a rational, reasonable treatment of intellectual property protection that avoids both extremes of “all information wants to be free” and “piracy is theft.”
  - the_af 5y ago
    I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but creating a clone of a game is completely unrelated to game piracy, and so neither of the extremes you mentioned would apply. They belong in a completely different debate.
- nekcihc 5y ago
  Mobile market has created wide access that was not something available to game devs in past - that's why there were game publishers. The speed of gaining market also is significantly faster. So, when devs complain about market speed slowing down - it is not because of clones. Clones apparently are appealing to completelly different market segment, than what "original" aimed at. It is erroneous to assume, that it was their market in first place! Ideas are sh!t and means nothing! If you have an idea - that means, that someone else(in counts of 100s or 1000s) have the same idea already, or someone else in past had that idea. There has been examples of similar products developed independently at the same time, so they might have looked like clones but they are not always clones. So, claiming that ideas are unique and should be somewhat appropriately rewarded... phew! I can relate to the frustrations that are described in article, but at the same time I can't understand if the people that complain have no brains, if they had not foreseen this outcome and did not calculated for how long they will get profit from their product - which was not forever in the first place!!! PS If you are an indie developer, you should educate yourself at least in basic level of marketing, law and business. And after that decide if indie development is for you and if you have a killing insticts of a shark or you are going to be food.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

This is just noted sleazeball Rami Ismail and his insider indiedev buddies trying to protect their profits

shkkmo 5y ago

While I understand the pain of developers who get their projects cloned, I think bit is a bad idea to make the platforms the arbitrators of intellectual property, especially when it isn't clear what the legal decision would be. While there are complete ripoffs that should clearly be removed, there are also iterative clones that steal some ideas and improve on others. This iterative cloning process has lead to some of the best games ever made and we should be careful about limiting them. If the indie developer's only reasonable recourse is to petition platforms, we need to reform the laws about to allow indie developer's a realistic and economically feasible route to address clones within the court system.

eezurr 5y ago

A part of me wishes for a video game crash to happen again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 But it wont, because most video games are no longer tied to physical products. It takes very little effort to purchase and delete video games now, and they take up 0 physical space. And, there isn't a new technology to replace the current mediums. They are also much cheaper compared to then. It was an interesting time in video game history though because the video game market in 1983 became saturated with low quality games and clones because Atari did not enforce any control over 3rd party studios/publishers. People lost trust in product quality and stopped purchasing games. There was a 97% drop in revenue. !!! (not a typo) Then Nintendo swooped in several years later and enforced quality control. Recently I heard the Nintendo Switch is opening the doors to 3rd party developers. I think Unity already has a module for creating games for the switch, so the flood is coming, if it hasn't already. My point is I'm sad to see everything go way of the internet. Procurement is dying and yet is necessary for quality. There's no enforcement in the Android store (and partially the the App Store) per the article. Steam opened its doors to everyone years ago and there are hundreds (or thousands?)* of new games added every day to steam. I believe they changed their algorithm to match games based on sales, not similarity (which makes sense, except my particular favorite genres don't have a lot of competition, so I really have to dig deep to find similar games). Haha.. maybe I'm just getting old. I just dont want to have to put effort into finding quality products. It's such a waste of time to go pioneering. Edit: *Correction, it's 100-200 a week, not per day.

telchior 5y ago
There's undoubtedly a flood of trash. But lower barriers to building games isn't making the game industry worse. Somewhat strained metaphor here, but think of energy. Cheap power generation helped the Industrial Revolution along and caused a ton of awful, smoke belching factories to pop up, and a lot of people hated that. But cheap electricity is also the bedrock of every innovation since (including the type HN likes). Easier accessibility to whatever resource always generates crap, but that crap always contains a percentage of treasure. And there's a lot of really, really good stuff hidden away on Steam that wouldn't exist without the easier tools we have today.
5y ago

jonplackett 5y ago

It’s not just games it’s everything. I made (i think) the first automatic face swap app back in 2012 when face detection first appeared in iOS. It did pretty well, got into the top 10 around the world. #1 for a bit. Made me some money. But there were tonnes of copies. One guy even flew over to meet me first from SF and said he wanted to buy the app. Offered me half a million dollars. Then when I said yes cut it to half that after he spoke to ‘the board’. Then said half that again - at which point I told him to go F himself - he’d also added into the contract I had to take the app offline and send him the source code for them to review before finalising, which would have ruined the purely viral growth. Within 2 weeks he had launched a virtually identical app - and I mean identical. Just a different name and icon. The entire UI was copied down to the smallest detail. So obviously he’d been working on it before I said no. I think this was his plan all along. To copy my app and use the potential buy out as distraction / disruption. He then sent me a really angry email with the choice line “if someone offer/ you a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat”.

orhmeh09 5y ago
I’m sorry he wasted your time, but I found this really funny. Thanks for sharing. What was the fate for either app?
- jonplackett 5y ago
  I also find it pretty funny now! Very glad I didn’t get mixed up with him in the end! It makes a funny story at least Mine is still online: facejuggler.com (though obviously very outdated now) I’m not sure what happened to his and all the others. There are so many copies now it’s hard to know.
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whiskyant 5y ago
>“if someone offer/ you a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat” That analogy only makes sense if he offered you equity, haha.

m0llusk 5y ago

With a pay to release model only previews are initially available and only when enough money is pledged for release is the full product made available. This is not a trivial model to adopt, but it holds promise for doing business without being at the mercy of copies. There are also many ways of adding value and capturing customer attentions. Community support and forums where people can find and share tutorials and extensions and come together for conversation and shared game play can add a great deal and keep customers coming to producers for more. This is especially true if there are ways of voting or making purchases that direct the course of ongoing development. Currently management of customer relations and engagement is not integrated with the development and vending of most games. Sure there is some marketing and promotions, but full community support and development is more than that. It may seem that being able to lock down so called intellectual property extends value for creators and thus the larger community, but there is also an argument to be made that all this focus on ownership and protection of ideas dulls and slows down every aspect of development.

baud147258 5y ago

well, the lesson here seems to be to avoid targeting mobile platforms. And even then if your game is so simple it can be cloned even before release, maybe it's just there's an oversupply of game/gamedevs and the market will correct itself (or not and artists will continue to produce art, even at a loss)

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brandonmenc 5y ago

Games are now like music. Selling music is a ship that has sailed. Decades ago. It seems the same thing is happening to - among other things - indie games Maybe you can get some donations, but that's about it. That's just the way it is now. It's still a million times better than the shareware days though. Back then, someone developing a passion project game could never dream of being able to reach a global audience and also take no-cost friction-free global payments from them. For every Apogee there were many orders of magnitude more developers who would have loved to pocket even a thousand dollars with their game. As with music, there is this imo strange idea among niche independent creators that they should be able to just get paid like a Hollywood star for making something that lots of other people are making. Do it because you enjoy it and be happy when you can collect four or five digits of cash, because the alternative is zero audience and zero money. And it always has been.

the_af 5y ago

I understand this is demoralizing and infuriating for indie devs. And indie devs are the kind of devs I want to support, so I really side with them. That said, for me this is the real insight (said by a dev from Vlambeer): > "Ultimately, the big question is: what can you do to combat clones? And in reality there's not a whole lot you can do. Or what you can do could legally jeopardise how game development works for future generations." > "If flying in a game was protected, then Luftrausers wouldn't exist" Ultimately almost every act of creativity has some core of... let's not call it stealing, let's call it "creative borrowing without asking for permission". That's how it works, authors take from what has come before. If, trying to protect indie devs from annoying copycats, we end up enforcing a draconian system, only lawyers will be happy.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

> Ultimately, the big question is: what can you do to combat clones? And in reality there's not a whole lot you can do. Of course there is. Get good. Make better games. It matters not if someone else reimplements your idea with inferior execution. If you're better at it than they are, your game is the better "clone" and celebrated for it. Even better: Make something so crazy that nobody can successfully copy it even it they try, because they can't figure out what makes it work.

cableshaft 5y ago
> Of course there is. Get good. Make better games. That was kind of the article's point. If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours). Especially if you haven't released on all platforms right away, which is extremely difficult to pull off. And if you market it at all, there could be clones out there before your game is even finished and out there, because you're busy trying to make something good and they're just rushing to get something that looks like the screenshot out there as soon as possible. > Even better: Make something so crazy that nobody can successfully copy it even it they try, because they can't figure out what makes it work. So spend 7 years working full-time with employees using money made from a previously successful game to make something like The Witness. Got it. Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  > If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours). Name it the same as an internet domain you control. Now you hold the keys to the name. > Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that. In other words, a fantastic niche to those who can.
- TillE 5y ago
  > If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly How? How on earth are you going to clone a game like Stardew Valley, or Disco Elysium, or Factorio, or No Man's Sky, or Subnautica, or etc etc etc of actual good PC indie games? You're not, not without an enormous amount of effort. This stuff pretty much only happens to very simple mobile games. When you're talking about actual meaty games, crappy clones are very easily recognized as such.

scotty79 5y ago

Stores should just group games by similarity and order them by date in search results.