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The Casual Game Clone Wars
Casual games are ever more financially lucrative in the new world of everyday games. With money to be made, clones of successful games can be launched in a very short period of time, resulting in the original title vying for financial success with its johnny-come-lately play-alike. From the article: "But, while PopCap's James Gwertzman comments in a recent interview of Zuma's success in 2004: 'We were all very excited about it, but it's 2005 and there have been a ton of very obvious Zuma clones', we have to ask - how about Mitchell's 1998 title Puzzloop for arcades, also known as Ballistic for PSX in the States? The game's basic design seems identical to Zuma. There was even some talk of Mitchell, which has released a PC version of Puzzloop, taking PopCap to court over the issue, though neither company has ever made public statements about it."
Snood's the same way. It's a clone of an 80s game. Gotta hand it to the developer tho, started off as a one-man operation, and it's made him millions.
The real problem is that some of these outfits have gotten so big, that if a small-time developer comes out with a new game gets any kind of good response, the big guys swoop in, draw some pretty graphics, and whammo, the little guy has just had his market taken away.
Even with that, I hope that this doesn't turn into a legal battle. The only people that win those things are the lawyers, and lawyers have ruined (or nearly ruined) enough industries already.
Unless you want to market games on a really unique and proprietary platform, casual gaming and commercial gaming are two things that are difficult to mix. This article shows the most obvious reason why: cloning. The reason for this is that most casual games are so simple that most programmers are able to whip out their own version, possibly making modifications to suit their personal needs.
The bright side of this is that these are ideal free software projects. When I delved into the world of free software, I could not help but notice that the majority of games available were small, casual games. Some of them were quite clever, many were unusually addictive, and the vast majority were clones of something.
If you ask me, casual games ought to be free software because, among other reasons, it A) helps to ensure the longevity of your game and B) helps others to not have to reinvent the wheel. Why rewrite your game as a clone when they can just port it to a new platform or create their own skins? If they think they can make it better, they already have your code to start off with, so they can extend it or examine it while writing their own engine.
I like to think of casual gaming as "generic gaming", and I find it to be healthy that there is a lot of borrowing going on.