Attack of the (Game) Clones!
Allen Varney has apparently ruffled a few feathers already amongst the indie community with his latest article for the EXCELLENT online gaming journal, The Escapist, in his new article:

Attack of the Parasites

I highly recommend the article. Of course, what he's saying is nothing new. We've been dealing with cloning and out-and-out rip offs of videogames since Pong. I don't remember the Pong clones too well, but I do remember how there was HUNDREDS of Space Invaders knock-offs in the arcades and on home computers. Heck, I even worked on a couple of them myself.

There's good clones and bad clones, and Varney touches on it. The good clones become games like Galaxian (and later, the absolutely stellar classic Galaga). Or Unreal Tournament. You've got a derivative that doesn't just parrot the original gameplay, but layers on some innovation on top of that.

Sure, it'd be great to be completely innovative and come up with a game that's completely different from what's come before it, but not only is that very hard to do, but the audience tends to ignore those games completely. It's too alien. This is part of why Pong succeeded where Computer Space previously failed.

When I was at Infogrammes (now Atari), my producer told me of a meeting he had with one of the head marketing honchos about working on budget titles. Apparently, we were told that it was easy - all we had to do was make cheap knock-offs of anything Microsoft was publishing, and he'd create similar packaging and a confusing name and he'd sell over a hundred thousand copies, easy. So the problem has been alive and well in the retail game industry for some time.

I believe this problem is of a set of problems known as the "suboptimization problem" in game theory, AKA the "Tragedy of the Commons." What's good for the individual isn't good for the community as a whole. The way to combat this is for some authority (a leader, or the community as a whole) to exert some authority over the individual to disincentivize that behavior. The soldier has to believe that he's better off taking his chances on the front line than desertion. But the whole beauty of indie game development (and capitalism as a whole) is the absolute lack of centralized authority and the freedom it brings. Especially since the portals are encouraging copycat games, I don't see this being a solution in the near-term.

Is there a solution? I don't know that either, except as mentioned in the article of keeping your game "copy resistant" by staying one step ahead of the competition, or by injecting a lot of personality into the game which is difficult to ape in a quick-and-dirty knock-off.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:57 PM (Permalink)