Clone culture and its continuous impact on indie developers
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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Are games really any different?<p>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?<p>This part confused me though:<p>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.<p>&quot;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&#x27;re signing up to play the game,&quot; Brier explains. &quot;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&#x27;re low quality because they don&#x27;t want to be subscribers, and they might even mark us as spam if they get our emails.<p>Where were these confused players coming from? Sounds like the site was designed poorly from a UX perspective.