Attack of the Clones

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 19, 2011

I don’t have issues with certain things that are called “cloning” games. Everybody copies / borrows game mechanics, UI layouts, control schemes, and whatnot from successful games. If we had to reinvent the wheel every time we made a game,  we’d lose the advantage of standing on the shoulders of giants. Great ideas are meant to be inspire others, be adopted by others — and then improved upon, or remixed with better ideas. That’s how we progress. That’s how we got from Doom to Duke Nukem 3D, and from Wizardry to Bard’s Tale. Or from Dungeon Keeper to the upcoming release Dungeons (I hope!).

But wholesale copying / reskinning of a game? Blatant replication of innovative game mechanics without adding anything of substance to the mix? And especially stealing assets (or code) from a game to make a clone? Not cool.

In other media, it doesn’t matter if you’ve added your own sentence here and there, swapped some words around, and changed the font. It’s still called plagiarism.

It can be a fine line. In the casual game arena, I remember (but apparently not too well) when a game came out called Fairies that was an out-and-out rip-off of Bejeweled Chuzzle. Not cool. Reflexive’s Big Kahuna Reef, on the other hand, took the basic gameplay from Bejeweled and innovated, throwing a lot more twists on the core match-three concept. Cool. A more marginal case was the gazillion-selling Diner Dash, which was a clone of the much more modest Betty’s Beer Bar. I didn’t play much of either game, but from what I could see, the former at least added a great deal more polish to every aspect of the game, including the gameplay. From my uninformed perspective and distant memory, I’d call it “Iffy at best” if I’m feeling charitable, but most likely belongs in the “uncool” category.

But then we have these sad cases:

#1 – An indie makes a game, shows it to a MAJOR PUBLISHER, gets turned down. But shortly after their game becomes a moderate hit, said MAJOR PUBLISHER suddenly releases a clone.  This one might charitably be seen in the  “iffy” category, but the core idea was so original and different that the genesis is pretty obvious. Plus there’s the fact that it’s a big game company ripping off a tiny indie, especially for a game they’d looked at and then “rejected” — that smells bad. Really bad.  The offending company in this case is Capcom, ripping off the indie X-Box hit ‘Slosion Man with their mobile device game MaXplosion.

‘Splosion Man Maker Calls Capcom’s MaXplosion “Complete Theft”

At least Capcom has come relatively close to apologizing for their behavior. About as much as they can without leaving themselves open to a lawsuit the indies can’t afford to engage in.

Capcom ‘Saddened’ Over Its ‘Splosion Man’ iPhone Rip-Off

#2 – This is more of an indie-versus-indie thing, but the offending party is not worthy of the modest title of “indie.” Here they ripped off a Flash game completely, merely substituting the main character art with art stolen from another Flash game, and threw it up onto the App Store for iPhone.

Did EdisonGame steal The Blocks Cometh from developer Halfbot?

Sheesh. There are lines that should not be crossed.  I know that these are not the first nor will they be the last time crap like this happens. But innocent, hard-working indies are the ones getting screwed here.  Bad news all around, topped with bad sauce.

Filed Under: Biz, Casual Games - Comments: 8 Comments to Read



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