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Opinion: Calling out the clones
by Tadhg Kelly [Console/PC, Social/Online, Smartphone/Tablet, Indie, Design, Business]
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January 25, 2012
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[In this opinion piece originally posted on the What Games Are blog, and reprinted in full with his permission, UK-based game designer Tadhg Kelly discusses the power in publicly calling out copycats, and how developers can 'win' again those knock-offs.]
In the same week, two stories about cloning are making various rounds. One involves Triple Town, a neat puzzle-sim game from Spry Fox, being cloned on the iOS App Store. The other story involves Zynga (predictably) first offering to buy and then copying Tiny Tower. Both have resulted in the original inventors calling out the clone for what it is in public.
Should anything be done?
Is it a clone?
Since the case of Dungeons and Dragons versus Palladium in the early '80s (if not well before), copyright has tended not to cover gameplay but instead its expression. So branding, appearance, trademark, level layout, music, and so on are all copyright, but inventions like a new game action are covered by patents. And patents are expensive.
Larger companies therefore have an incentive to copy from smaller companies, but change what they copy to avoid infringement. And they do so all the time. Even the companies that we regard as nice guys crib from the competition regularly in all fields in an ideas-versus-execution vein.
Often the question of just how cloned a clone is is just a matter of degrees and a willingness to go to court. Sometimes the copies become so pervasive and multiply that they coalesce into a whole genre, whereas at other times the copies rise and fall, leaving the original largely intact. Sometimes a clone wins if its owners are able to overwhelm the original's distribution. Sometimes the clone manages to get purchase on a new platform early.
At a gut level, cloning just feels wrong to many, yet at the same time it is often from aping the competition that new games are born. In the online age especially this becomes a complicated issue, as a game may well start out as a copy but then evolve into its own entity. Many behaviorist games (such as social games and gambling games) follow this path almost as a matter of course. They consider it good practice and lean development.
Yelling about it
When Spry Fox expressed their dissatisfaction over Yeti Town, it hit Twitter and other social networks. When NimbleBit felt aggrieved by Zynga's game, it took to the social airwaves to express that dissatisfaction and the story was picked up by TechCrunch.
There is no effective defense against cloning, but while another company may copy your product, they can't copy your voice. Your tribe can become very motivated by the injustice and take to the airwaves to say so. This has an effect in the market that may not become immediately apparent, but persists. You seem more awesome and they seem more shallow. Increasingly so as social media becomes involved.
These sorts of moves may seem ineffective, but they just take time to work. While the average muggle doesn't particularly care and will play the first version of a game to cross their path, fringe gamers do care. Authenticity matters, and it does no good to be silent. If you invented it, say so. If the clone copied copyright-able elements (like level structure or art), sue. Don't be meek, don't be invisible.
What winning looks like
It's important to understand what winning looks like. It is not always about being biggest, and to get swept up in a revenge-kick is dangerous. To be biggest is to be a different kind of company with different priorities and a different marketing story, and is that what you really want?
While Farm Town might claim that it had a legitimate claim to all of the players that FarmVille subsequently found, I suspect this is not true. Zynga may not be the most creative of organizations, but they do know how to spend money on customer acquisition ($120 million spent last year apparently), and in all likelihood those were customers that were otherwise out of reach.
Winning is also often about patience. PopCap had to watch as the entire world cloned Bejeweled, but they just kept at it, making the best version of the game and putting it into every platform. Slowly it reacquired a dominance and loyalty that the clones just couldn't match.
On an even more epic scale, Apple (once inspired by Xerox to make a great product, only to find it rather more closely inspired Microsoft and lost a dozen years in lawsuits in the process) is now the biggest technology company in the world. It just kept leading, telling its story, and proving it was better. Ditto for James Dyson, Nintendo, and many more.
Don't let the clone corrupt your intent. The worst effect that a clone can have is to compromise a creator, make her cynical and resentful. Clones happen just as sure as night follows day, and sometimes they are from big boys or untouchable companies in China. Equally, sometimes they are homages.
Whatever the reason, don't let it faze you. As with piracy, getting lost in the realm of what you think you're owed is both a fool's errand and a sad enterprise. Keep seeding, keep making awesome things and keep telling your story. Stay true.
P.S.
If you have 2700 people on staff, you really should be able to muster up an idea between you. Seriously guys.
[An Irish lead designer and producer living in London, Tadhg Kelly is the author of a challenging book about, as he describes it, "Reclaiming games as an art, craft and industry on its own terms", entitled What Games Are. The blog for the book is whatgamesare.com. You can also follow his tweets on Twitter (@tiedtiger).]
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I just got the impression that you guys thought that the two were done without permission.
In the case of Yeti Town, that's just typical of developers for iOS. There are probably thousands of rip-offs of other games or at least their titles to try to grab people who are looking for the original only to find their page instead. They usually only show one screenshot of something that looks remarkably like the game they are looking for. The user may not notice this and buy it before realizing it was a rip-off or worse, scam.
We should all think a little less of Zynga and 6waves Lolapps.
The comparison to piracy is apt. As a phenomenon, we can't do much about it, and it's counterproductive to try. But just as we might personally disdain some particularly bad individual pirates, we can publicly shame those who clone. Luckily, many of the clone shops are big, obvious targets.
I think Spry Fox and Nimblebit handled this perfectly, and your postscript is right on the money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K.C._Munchkin
As far as I know, Palladium was never sued by TSR. Palladium sued WOTC though, when WOTC first started out and published a generic supplement meant for fantasy RPGs and included some stuff for Palladium's games, who absolutely forbade stuff like that.
There was something between Mayfair and TSR, though.
It's been a long time since I dredged this information up, but I seem to remember that Palladium in particular had some struggles with D+D because it had co-opted various terms such as 'Strength', 'Alignment' ad so on.
http://www.antimonopoly.com/game_history.html
While I find if a developer were to create a game based on similar mechanics, he or she should not use it as a commercial product. Doing that is nothing better than an insult to the original company.
Using it as a form of research or self-development is fine, but the moment you make money out of it, it becomes an issue.
Indeed, the issue of originality may not be there anymore, but that doesn't mean we just clone off a successful without making it better. Adding features or improving mechanics may be fine, but to not make a single change to it, it speaks volume of what kind of designer you are.
Zynga is one such company I personally dislike, for their development and products are indeed mindless cloning of pre-existing games, with a change in context being all there is to it. While they do earn money doing it, they are destroying the industry by providing more of the same. How will you like it if every restaurant serve the same tasting soup everyday?
My final point will be, making a clone of a game, you better be sure to improve it, or implement it in such a manner it makes the mechanic of that game much better, not just change the context.
The term "regurgitate" also comes to mind.
(My comment on the topic, "A Game Studio Culture Dictionary"
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6504/a_game_studio_culture_dictionary.php)
________________________
- Ziro out.
The fact that we're even asking "hmm, is it a clone if it's exactly the same rules with different art" is SO telling about the state of digital game culture. If people had a better understand of the fact that a game IS a set of rules, then they would be able to clearly answer this question.
If you want to know just why such an idea is a horrible idea patenting game mechanics is, you should listen to this episode of This American Life:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-paten ts-attack
But either way, it should be PATENTLY obvious that cloning mechanics is cloning a game.
If we could not clone mechanics, then the ability to create genres of games will die.
For more about this, I point you to my article:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EZacharyKnight/20110816/8207/Copying_M echanics_is
_Not_Theft_Nor_is_it_Infringement.php
My favourite example is US6200138, which claims "A game display method for displaying a game in which a movable object is moved in a virtual space, comprising the steps of: setting a dangerous area around the movable object; and when a character enters the dangerous area, moving the character in a direction in which the character is moved away from the movable object".
Having a legal monopoly on something like that is pretty outrageous if you ask me, and that patent is not the only (or worst) offender. Since to my knowledge this kind of patent has never been tested in court, it's not clear if and to what extent they are enforceable, but they do exist. It is also true that it would be nigh impossible to get such a claim granted in other jurisdictions, such as in Europe, but being able to close off the US market to their games could be for most developers/publishers a pretty serious threat.