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Indie developer Nimblebit dropped a PR bomb on Zynga yesterday with it’s letter addressing the similarities between their hit iPhone game Tiny Tower and Zynga’s upcoming release, Dream Heights. This galvanized the gaming community, with thousands of people, from prominent bloggers to gamers on Reddit criticizing the company.
However, just after the new year, Atari ordered the removal of Black Powder Media’s Vector Tanks, a game strongly inspired by Atari’s Battlezone. This galvanized the community in a similar way, except this time, gamers were furious that Atari shut down an indie game company that made an extremely similar game.
Unfortunately, the line between inspiration and copying is incredibly blurry at best. The one thing that’s certain is that copying is here to stay. Copying has been present in some form since the dawn of capitalism (if you need proof, just go to the toothpaste isle of your local supermarket). The game industry is no stranger to this trend: game companies have been copying each other for years. Given it’s repeated success, there’s little reason to think that this practice will stop. Indie flash game studio XGEN Studios posted a response to Nimblebit, showing that their hit games were also copied:
Some would even argue that the incredibly successful iOS game Angry Birds was a copy of the popular Armor Games flash game, Crush the Castle, but then Crush the Castle was inspired by others that game before it. Social games even borrow many of their game mechanics from slot machines to increase retention. So what is copying, or more importantly, which parts of it are moral and immoral? Everyone seems to have a different answer, but it’s safe to say that people always copy the most successful ideas. The one thing that those in the Zynga-Nimblebit conversation seems to have overlooked is that everyone copies others in some way.
Of course, while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it doesn’t feel good to be imitated when a competitor comes after your users. In this case, people may question Zynga’s authenticity and make a distinction between inspiration and outright duplication. But at the same time, Zynga’s continued success with the “watch, then replicate” model shows that marketing, analytics, and operations can improve on an existing game concept. Or just give them the firepower to beat out the original game, depending on how you look at it.
I want to hear your thoughts: Should game companies be encouraged or punished for taking the best ideas from other games? Where do you draw the line between inspiration and duplication? Sound off in the comments.
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When we talk about punishments for acts of inspiration, we are toeing the line of what has happened in the patent arena. Patents have gone from a tool to help inventors succeed in the market place, to a tool to prevent inventors and innovators from succeeding. This is a dangerous path for game design to head down.
I encourage you to listen to this entire episode of THis American Life and seriously rethink your idea of punishment for acts of inspiration:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-paten ts-attack
But @E Zachary Knight... It seems hardly fair that a bigger company with more means to make a bigger game, polishing it further and adding more content, adressing the shortcomings of a genuinely independent product.
If you pit them against each other, under the public's generally uninformed eye, I would hardly call it a fair fight, they will definately go for A: the one their friends are playing or they see advertised, and B: whatever is more polished and gives them more playtime. Observing some of the feedback weve had with our games, it's pretty plain to see that the general audience doesn't even read descriptions of the games they do purchase. It's a bit much to expect them to inform themselves of games they just happen to see at the store.
That said, yeah I'm all supportive of a self regulated amorphous market that on itself denounces plagiarism... But it does seem it would be the jungle out there. I say we stone them to death! get your best Pitchfork / Torch!
I honestly suppose that this responsibility should actually fall on Apple, or whoever keeps the store (even if this is wildly unpopular and a horrible business decision). If they are so touchy with their own IP when it comes to their devices (Yes Apple, I'm looking at you when you ban samsung tablets from being sold), they should really be coherent when it comes to the space they have enabled for software distribution. Of course noone likes to mess with providers when you are the sole winner of all the competition in the end.
In THIS case, I would say the tower defense game type has been done so many times in so many different ways by so many different people - that there is no purpose in protecting it intellectually.
And who owns the concept of the gauntlet? Klingons probably. Like maybe Worf during his Second Right of Ascension.
I think Klingons have a copyright/patent on tower defense games.
I have never liked patents or trademarks because they (sometimes) slow down innovation upon ideas in order to reimburse research and development or, in the case of leaderboard patents, punish re-invention. Morally, if you copy a game closely, you should donate a cut to the original, but the original should not have any temporary monopoly either. If a clone refuses to pay tribute to the original (whether money or advertisement), then that becomes an iffy situation. Personally, I think both should just coexist. Morals can't be forced on others, so inventors might as well deal with it without feeling cheated, it'll reduce their stress exponentially.
Even more important than donating to the original is paying it forward and investing in small indie companies with big ideas.
All opinion, of course.
It does feel insulting that someone would take your idea and produce it as their own, but it's par for the course - we gotta deal with it. Even if someone makes an outright clone of your game, it's still a perfectly fair thing to do. Will you lose money because of it? Well, that depends on how good your game is, and whether or not the clone is better (or at least better value for money). If you're good, you have nothing to worry about - if you're bad, you *should* have everything to worry about.
I believe that's how Zynga crushed their first competitors out of the market. Copy something, then drown the competitor out with ads.
Some companies do diferent things better than others. Some companies can see a design and improve it. Others see a game and improve the graphics or the sound or the AI. Other companies can do marketing better. That is not something that needs to punished.
Now if Zynga is out spending your marketing efforts, that can be frustrating. However, money is not the only way to get word out about a game. Take what Nimblebits did. They couldn't afford to out market Zynga, so what did they do? They got hundreds of game news sites talking about their game in a single day. There are at least 6 articles on Gamasutra that reference their game or company.
I thought the Godard quote was the most important bit. If you only do what others have done, that's copying. If you take what others have done and add something significantly original to it (i.e. not just a few new art/sound assets on the same set of mechanics), then you are contributing something positive to the field and are ethically OK. Minecraft is distinctively more than just a reskinned Infiniminer.
Of course, deciding "significantly original" is a subjective call....
we'll have a future where:
"Publishers with the best marketing department win"
(assuming the tools and talent to copy become more of a commodity)
The opposite extreme (Profitability by litigation or "Sue everyone")
we have a future where:
"Publishers with the best lawyers win"
Either outcome is bad for the small indie developer. Whether Zynga copied Tiny Tower is subjective, but I do applaud NimbleBit's actions for getting the word out this way, (at least the informed public get to decide whether this is a blatant rip-off).
It is hard enough for indies to make a decently popular game for mobile (like 1 in 1,000), much less a profitable one. If the big guys just sit around and clone anything that get popular, that's not good for the little guy. (What if they offer a free ad-supported knockoff alternative to a popular paid indie-developed title).
My opinion: Borrowing mechanics and gameplay is fine, just make sure you do it justice by improving it, or implementing it into your game so darn well, anyone can refer to the original, yet still see your originality.
Case in point: Uncharted vs Tomb Raider.
Both game employs similar mechanics. Tomb Raider is the original, innovative and exciting. While Uncharted uses the same gameplay, what makes it better is the ability to blend the mechanic so well with the game, with story, characters, setting and flow.
From such, we can see how "copying" can result in two similar games, but providing different experience. That's how a developer should copy.
For improving, we look at Puzzle Quest and Bejewelled.
Both are similar match-three games, but Puzzle Quest went beyond that by using the match-three mechanic to create a puzzle-RPG.
I won't blame a developer for copying a mechanic. But I will blame him if he do use it mindlessly, without improving OR implementation.
Games of such complexity could not be developed by commercial interests. There is such overlap in what independent / hobbyist developers need from Middleware that their contribution to a free Open Source alternative is an inevitability. The quality of presentation in AAA games will plateau with the next generation (if the costs don't already mean that they have already got as good as they can get, due to the financial ceiling imposed on production costs by art and animation, rather than any technical hardware restrictions), allowing everyone else to catch up. Their efforts may never qualify as AAA, but their quirky aesthetics may have more charm than another bunch of balding Space Marines and swordswomen with jiggle-Physics.
that's not enough money to be creative
You want creative? Buy a vita, pay for for real games