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Is Dong Nguyen Trolling Gamers With "Swing Copters"?
Nerval's Lobster writes Given its extreme difficulty, it's tempting to think that the new Swing Copters is Dong Nguyen's attempt at a joke (You thought 'Flappy Bird' was hard? Check this out!), or maybe even a meta-comment on the emerging "masocore" gaming category. Or maybe he just wanted to make another game, and the idea of an ultra-difficult one appealed. Whatever the case, Nguyen can rely on the enduring popularity of Flappy Bird to propel Swing Copters to the top of the Google and iOS charts. But his games' popularity illuminates a rough issue for developers of popular (or even just semi-popular) apps everywhere: how do you deal with all the copycats flooding the world's app stores? Although Google and Apple boast that their respective app stores feature hundreds of thousands of apps, sometimes it seems as if most of those apps are crude imitations of other apps. The perpetual fear among app developers is that they'll score a modest hit—only to see their years of hard work undermined by someone who cobbles together a clone in a matter of weeks or days. If Apple and Google want to make things friendlier out there for developers, they might consider stricter enforcement policies for the blatant rip-offs filling their digital storefronts.
Point out literally any trivial mistake in any popular platform or game, and they(they being self-identified gamers) will inexplicably act as if you have invented the most vile insults about their parentage.
Honestly, my observation is that it's harder to not troll gamers than to do so.
I just wanted to post "trolling with a swinging dong" and have it be relevant to the story for once.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Gee, I dunno. Maybe ask some of the big studios that squeeze out sequel after sequel of identical games that look in no way different than the identical games offered by the studio next to it?
It's not like that phenomenon is unique to the handheld gaming market. You get the same kind of crap on PC as well. A thousand similar FPS combat about as many RTS clones for popularity.
And since AI is hard, you get the same shit with crappy AI from the Indie devs and call it Zombie shooter, since you're kinda expecting a zombie to be kinda mindlessly dumb, so nobody is gonna complain about an AI too dumb to dodge simple pits with mindless straight-to-the-player pathing. Actually, I'm kinda astonished that only a few big studios jumped on the latest Z-shooter fad to cut corners.
And of course mix in the load of "Minecraft meets $genre" games we've been thrown at recently. From Minecraft-zombieshooter to Minecraft-spacerace, everything's available.
You think the handheld market is full of copycats? Compared to the PC market they're petty amateurs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At first I thought, "years of hard work"? How can this be when clones fill up the store in a matter of days? Doesn't seem like it is that much work. Then I thought, well perhaps designer spends years designing a game with all sorts of clever ideas then copiers use them all a few days after release. I have to ask, though, is this what happens? Surely a game must spend some time before becoming popular enough to copy, during which it builds a following and has first mover advantage. Copiers can't copy those advantages. It seems like it is still worth doing to many since folks are still making games for these platforms.
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So when someone expends significant effort and time to develop something we want to ensure that they realize the benefit for their work. The challenge is that once the work has been done, it is easy for someone else to copy it and steal your profits (because they avoided all the development costs).
What is being asked is for an institution, such as Google or Apple, to take steps to prevent other from copying one's work.
Put another way, the ask is that Google/Apple create a private patent system.
I have to laugh that when developers want to take advantage of other people's work, they condemn patents, but when they find their own work being cloned suddenly they are clamoring for someone to come in and protect their work...
Thomas Edison was one of numerous scientists that were working on similar "inventions". Scientists shared notes and findings which lead to the invention of the filament bulb, but it surely was not one guy doing all of the work.
The patent system gave a monopoly to Edison and isolated every other scientist that worked on the bulb reducing "their" work to non-existence a short time later. It did not help anything in science, and the only person that benefited was "Edison".
The same guy by the way, that staged live executions to show how dangerous AC was and cost Tesla numerous contracts (one of numerous publicity stunts to help his own career and harm others). It only cost Tesla most of his funding. It only took us a century to figure out what a genius Tesla really was and what a dickhead Edison really was.
I'm sure we could spend time digging and find a patent that is not complete bullshit, but your example is surely not one of the few.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It took a lawsuit for Atari to kill KC Munchkin ... and even then they only won on appeal : http://www.mathpirate.net/log/...
If KC Munchkin was a rip-off of Pac Man, then every first person shooter is a rip-off of Wolf 3D. (which might've been a rip-off of Space Simulation).
Don't get me wrong -- there needs to be something done about people making crappy games and tricking people into buying it (eg, The War Z), but once in a while, someone makes a *better* game that's similar to something that already exists (eg, Arkanoid vs. Break Out).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I was quite amused when I found out that they now have a board game version of Words With Friends.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Those original games are blatant rip-offs as well.
Angry Birds? Flappy Birds? I had similar games on my C64 and those were probably already copies of similar games on Atari and earlier computers.
Except for the eye-candy, these games could be programmed by anyone taking a basic programming/gaming 101 course.