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Capcom 'Saddened' By Game Plagiarism Controversy
Capcom's recent release of action platformer Maxsplosion for the iPhone caused indie developer Twisted Pixel to call Capcom out for copying the concept from their successful Xbox Live game 'Splosion Man. Twisted Pixel said they had no plans for legal action, since they were "too small to take on a company like Capcom." The indie studio had even pitched the game to Capcom for publishing at one point, but were declined. Now, Capcom has released a statement denying that Maxsplosion's development team had any knowledge of the meetings and saying, "MaXplosion was developed independently by Capcom Mobile. Nonetheless, we are saddened by this situation and hope to rebuild the trust of our fans and friends in the gaming community."
/. readers 'saddened' by misspelling of "controversy" in the title.
The games look a lot simlar, in gameplay and in the name, but I'm sure it's a coincidence. Poor Capcom, getting bashed like that.. Like they've ever rehashed a successful game concept!
I know corporations are people now and everything but I find their expressions sometimes difficult to interpret. Can we ask that they include a "current mood" icon on their corporate website or something so we can all avoid potentially embarrassing situations?
Judging by the video, Capcom's game looks like as much a rip-off of Splosion Man as of Sonic the Hedgehog.
If this is the product of the wholly-owned subsidiary that used to be called Cosmic Infinity, then I'm not surprised. There were a shithole back when they were independent, cranking out such shovelware classics as "Who wants to be a millionaire", which was little more than "You don't know Jack" 's Java engine with a different set of questions. That shop was an embarassment to the Canadian tech industry, and for Capcom to buy them up, well that just shows how little they care about the mobile segment.
For Twisted Pixel, this is not worth suing, because if push came to shove, Capcom will simply disown the studio and there will be nothing to go after. This is partially why big game houses farm out the shady/underdeveloped titles to subsidiaries: limited liability.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I mean, I see the similarities and everything, and if I were them I'd go after Capcom.
Of course, maybe their motivation for not doing so has nothing to do with Capcom being huge... maybe they're afraid of some Jihadist group claiming prior art.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
If the likely net cost of the lawsuit times the likeliness of that lawsuit succeeding is smaller than the expected revenue minus the goodwill hit, then move ahead.
If Damages * Likelihood is greater than Revenue, then proceed.
Just as simple as that. Just like any other lesson from school. I've been amazed and disgusted at how openly some executives have admitted this to me. And they almost always phrase it precisely like that.
After more than a few drinks.
Usually then they laugh and look smug.
Our executive culture is fundamentally rotten. Fundamentally. Every fucking "premium" MBA program in America should be forced to publish their curricula and have outside experts analyze their lectures. Seriously. Because these days this kind of criminality is quite literally taught in our business schools. You think I'm exaggerating? Get a few drinks into a graduate of a high status MBA program on a day that they're feeling good and ask them.
Twisted Pixel said they had no plans for legal action, since they were "too small to take on a company like Capcom."
Substitute "Pirate Bay" for Capcom and you'll know how small sized artists feel.
"We here at Capcom are saddened that we have been caught ripping off this game, now we know that we can't go after Minecraft, Super Meat Boy etc without getting noticed."
Capcom gave out a response that the games were due to coincidence? Wouldn't it have been better for them to say nothing at all?
God spoke to me.
Now, Capcom has released a statement denying that Maxsplosion's development team had any knowledge of the meetings and saying, "MaXplosion was copied independently by Capcom Mobile.
fixed that for you.
maxsplosion is a blatant copy of splosion man. i wrote a short story in 3rd grade where a man named flilligan got stranded on a desert island with several other castaways, and that wasn't even as blatant as this.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
copying the concept
Isn't that perfectly allowed, as long as they don't copy any actual code, data, or trademarks? If cloning a concept is a problem, then there are a lot of open source projects and indie games in trouble :S
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
"We are sad that someone noticed, and hope that people will forget that we did this."
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Bad publicity for Capcom and good publicity for Twisted pixel.
Capcom being a huge established studio with multiple franchises definitely does not need the bad publicity but for a small indie studio any publicity is good publicity.
We here at Capcom are saddened that [...] we can't go after Minecraft, Super Meat Boy etc without getting noticed.
Well, I think that they don't care that much about simply getting noticed.
They're saddened that they could lose sales because of bad publicity as a consequence.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
To be fair, they could probably code a better Minecraft than the official client and server that Mojang have been putting out. :3
~ C.
As I said on Youtube:
Moving on with my development of Ultra man, Leet Fighter II, next up Resilient Evil! ;)
Hi. OP here. no, I meant precisely that executives have admitted to me that this approach is taught in business schools. Which should be no great surprise since it's none too far a stretch from the philosophies of people like Alfred P. Sloane who organized and endowed many of these schools in the first place.
http://streetcarstospaceships.typepad.com/s2s/2008/12/i-dont-want-to-live-in-a-society-run-by-a-bunch-of-generals.html
Iacocca's autobiography, oddly enough, goes into quite a bit of detail about this. And the Harvard Business School just sponsored the publishing of a business philosophy book that does an impressive job of pretending not to have noticed the systemic issues involved at all.
Look into the schools. The ivies. University of Chicago. Stanford. From what I can tell Yale's SOM is a bit different but not all that much.
This sh*t is canon now. They call it things like "a statutory obligation to maximize shareholder value" and various other mahooah but it adds up to profit for executives being the value to maximize with all else to be managed as annoyances, intrusions, and/or crops to be harvested and resources to be liquidated and stripped of value as quickly as possible.
Ayn Rand's disciples have merged with Laffer's mock scientists, media manipulation, and accumulated robber baron techniques to create a staggeringly powerful but short-sighted looter culture that is, quite literally, in danger of taking over and destroying the world. Ask the folks in Brisbane if I'm exaggerating.
This article really needs pictures.
Last time I checked game plagiarism was a good thing. As long as the game has different levels, it's a great way to play more of a game you liked. It also makes game developers improve over the same formula, making for better experiences.
Woot. Your executive have a conscience , since they shame themselves saying it while not drunk. here around they openly say it while sober, as long as the cost of doing something is above the benefit , don#t do it, if it is below, do it. That include patent and copyright infringement.
Justice now is one-way only? And nore interesting, always on the side of the stronger? Strange, I suppose the whole idea of "justice" is protect the weak from the stronger...
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Hi. OP again. Fwiw, I first heard the formulation above at an inventor's conference in Crystal City in, iirc, 1985 from one of the conference speakers. Funny thing, in his case he was mentioning it as the reason that he said most companies *won't* steal inventions. After all, afahcs, they also then followed the rule that if the lawsuit was likely and the damage solid, it was cheaper just to buy the frackin' thing.
Problem is, as books like The Innovator's Dilemma lay out, Not Invented Here makes it, oddly enough, more acceptable in business culture to steal it than to yield the control that buying it is PERCEIVED to cost. As social scientists have long since documented, the perception is that loss of centralized control is a massive no-no on the path to maximized control, and thence profit, by a small executive core. Personally I think Barbara Garson's 70's and 80's books do the best job of documenting those behaviors though if you really want to dive into Google Scholar there's plenty of formal documentation by now. Start with "satisficing behavior".
Which is interesting, isn't it?
Ya see, the MBA programs have shifted to being training grounds for looters but, sometimes in their very midst, a few working economists and other social scientists have been documenting these behaviors all along.
Which, btw, is part of why I suggested transparency and such instead of some crude "up against the wall, motherfuckers!" formulation. There actually ARE good folks in the relevant fields. But they're not setting the agenda. Why? Again, look at who endows the chairs, the programs, etc.
The entire gameplay and concept of the Capcom game is a blatant ripoff of the superior original. It's a terrible ripoff. The graphics are terrible, the game looks and feels phoned in.
The original has beautiful graphics, funny, original concept and excellent gameplay.
Go Capcom!
Capcom's glory days were in 1990 when Streetfighter II came out. Since then everything they've done has been a clone of that original franchise or a blatant ripoff of someone else's work. Frankly it's beyond pathetic that a huge company would have to behave this way.
Look again at what you just wrote. "make the most of every resource you have". "make the most". What does that mean exactly? "every resource you have". What do you mean by that? And do they "have" things that first they need to steal? Do I "have" your possessions? The contents of your bank account? Is that a view of the world we should look at and say "that's only natural"? If that's not "too far" for you, what is?
Not only that, ya see, you actually *don't* even always maximize gain by maximizing short-term profits.
Societies are complex and even large corporations are, too. So overall impact can be very hard to judge. And the further a decisionmaker goes over into behaviors that are known to be destructive, the more they're gambling on their ability to simulate what will happen overall. And the faster the world changes, the less valid such an approach becomes.
Also, fwiw, as a society we've become far more accepting of certain kinds of exploitative behavior. And other parts of the world aren't already. It's not an unaddressable given that this kind of thing will succeed. You see, if we know their algorithm, we can hack it and them. Which includes thing like calling them on what they train their students to see as "exogenous factors" that they're supposed to ignore. Reality, you see, has no "exogenous factors".
So, what can folks like us do to shift that dynamic? Ask the Diaspora team, Linus Torvalds, Dave Weiner, or Anonymous and they'll all have usable suggestions to make.
>>They're saddened that they could lose sales because of bad publicity as a consequence.
I thought all publicity was good publicity? =)
Capcom is just saddened they got caught... No worries if it sells enough copies, Apple will in turn copy it and then ban the original from their application store!
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
They'd at least complain to apple and have the app taken down. A more clear copyright infringement there couldn't be. This, by the way, was what copyright law was intended for... and it's sad that it has little to no affect on cases like this anymore and is instead used by the very companies the laws are supposed to protect us against.
"too small to take on a company like Capcom."
Which is exactly why Capcom can and did.
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The only reason capcom is "saddened" is because twisted pixel was smart enough not to sue.
They've figured out a new way to reorder the 5 step plan!
Step 1: ???
Step 2: We may have no idea what to do, but a tiny little company that's way too small to sue us made a successful game!
Step 3: Copy their idea.
Step 4: Profit!
Step 5: Act remorseful when the similarities are inevitably discovered.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
...from good old Commander Keen
I was under the impression that gameplay plagiarism in video games was a time honored tradition, and is not illegal in any way unless the actual source code or data is plagiarized.
How many Angry Birds clones are there?
I can see there being trademark infringement here because of the name, but nothing else.
Considering Notch coded Minecraft in OpenGL 1.1 and has lighting on a cubic basis is manually calculated on every "chunk" update, yeah Capcom could CODE Minecraft better (they won't update it afterwards however).
I'm not dissing Minecraft the game: I own it since the alpha before 10000 sales (it's over 1 million now). It's just really primitively implemented and Notch needs to buy and read a book like OpenGL 2.0 for dummies.
That way small companies will have even *less* ability to fight the giants in court. Oh wait, that doesn't help at all.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Everyone should buy this game and then post a bad review for it. That will teach 'em!
--- What?
I see a pattern here where these big cat corps think thay can just pick up ideas from little devs and shoulder it out.
What is your take on free clones of UNIX, distributed under such names as FreeBSD, Fedora, and Ubuntu?
maxsplosion is a blatant copy of splosion man.
yeah, and linux is a blatant copy of unix. you sound like sco.
I guess makes a corporation seem more human when they can pretend to express a mood, after all they are technically people!
In other news today, Playstation felt irritated and exasperated because of PS3 pirates, Linux feels disappointed and neglected for another year, Facebook feels cheerful and optimistic about the coming year, and Apple was full of rage and jealousy because Google looked so damn cheerful and content.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Besides which, after selling 1 million copies of minecraft within a year, they have several million dollars they could spend actually launching a lawsuit if Capcom was to blantantly rip them off, and since the majority of minecraft players are pretty attached to the game and it's creator, it'd probably be a lot more likely Capcom really would see a million less shoppers in the future.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Capcom did not violate copyright. You cannot copyright a game mechanic, a character design, or a game concept. This isn't like Capcom pulled art assets out of Splosionman and resized them before putting them into Maxplosion, or put Splosionman through a disassembler and included chunks of the resulting code in their own game, or made a character or logo so similar that it would violate trademarks (remember, trademark law operates on very different principles than copyright law), Capcom has little to fear in the legal arena, and both sides know it. People saying "sue sue sue"... I understand the urge, but Twisted Pixel would lose lose lose. The case filing might even be rejected out-of-hand and never see a judge or jury.
That doesn't make what Capcom did right or ethical, though. The real fallout of this is that independent game developers and studios seeking a distributor or licensee will now look at Capcom and say "if they like my idea they'll just make a cheap knockoff. No way am I letting them anywhere near me, they simply cannot be trusted. Maybe I'll approach THQ or Ubisoft of Xynga instead.". And if you can't trust Capcom to not behave honorably when you reveal a fully-formed design to them during a pitch, how can you trust them on any other issue like, say, whether they will write you a check you are owed, or credit you for work you have done? Why would you want to do business with Capcom? Why would you want to work for Capcom? Why would you ever invite a Capcom employee into your office? Why would you ever view Capcom as anything other than a disk duplicator without morals or an "off"switch?
Yeah, if I were Capcom I'd be "sad" too. They've severely compromised their reputation among indie developers. Indies talk to each other... a lot... and word of this behavior will have already reached just about every indie that has seen even moderate success.
This, however, does not lessen the fact that many indie developers copy larger companies' (or each other's) games. Scrabble vs. Scrabulous, anyone? If it's not ethical for a big company to steal from little companies and individuals, then it's also not ethical for little companies and individuals to steal from little ones. It works both ways or neither way. Capcom behaved no differently from the army of shovelware (cr)app developers who put out knockoffs of just about every successful game ever. The difference is that we expect better from established companies, and that when an indie approaches a publisher there needs to be some trust that they aren't being used as unpaid designers. Capcom has lost that trust, and deservedly so.
Capcom used to occasionally come up with good games with original concepts. I guess those days are over for good now, eh?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I wonder what the reaction would be if it weren't CapCom who had written a "knockoff" product, but rather an open source one.
My bet is that most of the people piously talking about how evil mimicking ideas was, would be defending the open source project.
Mark me down as on the side of allowing software engineers to be inspired by other products which, while having some interesting elements, just don't quite get all the way there. Otherwise we just hold back innovation.
The last thing the world needs are patents and lawsuits on "well it kind of looks the same". And I refuse to condemn CapCom for doing what many many open source project openly do - making a better fit for the actual need. Yes, even for games.
There's a forum thread where a developer of MaXplosion admits that they were inspired by Splosion Man. Isn't that enough of a smoking gun?
Originality is a myth. Every idea that ever has been had wouldn't have been had were it not for other ideas others had in the past. Anyone who claims he is owed for an idea he had is a hypocrite for he then also owes many others for the ideas that inspired his.
Also, people think of things all the time, everywhere, and have forever. There's no way to know who thought of an idea first, and it doesn't matter, since people can think of things independently at different times.
All these "controversies" are nothing more than a bunch of whining babies crying, "I thought of it first!" They think they're entitled to receive compensation for as long as they live because they "created" something, and that they should be able to control others' actions that have anything to do with anything related to anything they ever "created."
I'm getting so sick of the very idea of "intellectual property." Ideas cannot be--should not be able to be--owned. If there were a global referendum to abolish copyrights and patents, I'd vote in favor of it. Let those who want to keep secrets keep them as trade secrets, as many already do. Let others reverse engineer ideas and products, as they already do, but without legal problems. Let others use the ideas that flow into and out of societies to build upon and improve the world.
Let those who work be rewarded for their work, and let those who think of ideas also be rewarded for their work, not be eternally rewarded for a thought they once had, or a "work" they once did or recorded.
The world would be better off. (Can you imagine cavemen paying royalties to the guy who made the first wheel? "Hey, Grog, you can't cut that piece of wood into that shape and roll something on top of it! I thought of that! You have to give me your firstborn mastodon or else!")
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Why does everyone seem oblivious to the fact that splosion man 'borrows' a few concepts from other games as well?
I mean, climbing by alternatively jumping from opposing walls, that's been around for some time.
Wheels with platforms aren't new and neither is clinging on to edges of platforms.
The explosion is just a repacked jump mechanic.
Factory and lava settings used to be the spill of platform games in ye old days.
So what else is there to make a case out of?
And for every game you mention that does have a patented mechanic I can come up with dozens that don't.
And one major game whose copyright owner routinely pretends that its copyright is a patent: Tetris. In 2009, The Tetris Company threatened Biosocia, operator of Omgpop.com, with a lawsuit over having copied the rules of Tetris into Blockles. Six months later, they settled out of court with Biosocia agreeing to replace Blockles with a Puyo clone by the same name.
Once the iPhone app universe came into existence, the whole idea of "plagiarism" is kind of moot. Everybody is ripping everyone else off. While I agree that 1st tier game developers/distributors should not be so blatant as to rip off someone else's games, its going to happen.
You can either mire the whole game/app world in copyrights, DRM, patents, lawsuits etc, or you can accept the fact that people are going to take one good idea and make it better then yours, so either compete (make your idea better again), or get out of the way.
Personally I think the Indie developer in question here better be careful because A LOT of indie content is rip offs of other games. If they are not careful then EA, Capcom, and other Tier 1 game companies are going to start going after every indie developer that has a game with similar principles.
If Indies start going after mainstream, mainstream is going to come down hard and protect their own content more aggressively, this will ruin the indie game scene.
Best thing for an indie in this situation is to get picked up by one of Capcom's competitors, and let the Tier 1 companies battle it out.