The recent months have been providing agreable reading moments while browsing a variety of forums. It seems some devs are becoming more and more puzzled by how certain apps magically reach the top spots in no time flat. Like here and here.
There are clones and then there are CLONES. This one is utterly gorgeous!!! https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/flappy-3d/id874393038?mt=8
What nice interesting read, I'll try to do what these guys did, I heard some people claim they only paid $1,000 for ads and ended up getting over 30,000 downloads.
When you say ads, do you mean banner ads on websites? Also is that 30k free downloads? Because that won't make you much money. You need hundreds of thousands of downloads for free games to be financially viable. Of course, I'm talking about free games with ads... you might have some luck with IAP (I have yet to try F2P)... I think I had around 5k downloads of Codestorm... that brought in around $5, so certainly going free with ads isn't worth it unless you get some MASSIVE download numbers.
Clones have been in the app store for a long time now atleast since ive been developing (last 3 years). I think what has really increased the cloning are simple apps being on the top lists. These apps are super easy to clone so people are doing it more often. To be honest I am all for developers wasting their time cloning. The way I see it is these developers are spending their time coping other games instead of creating new games. This results in less completion for the real game market.
I completely agree with @Destined. We are better off applying our time and efforts by developing better applications.
You might not say that when one of your games is cloned. It happened to me. Not only that, the prick made a template for both Corona and Gamesalad, so that anyone could release the same game. It's not a nice feeling. I spent a while chasing the clones and having them removed from the App Store but I just gave up in the end.
I can imagine how bad you felt about that. If I were on your shoes I would be very upset too. But it's an inglorious fight. I don't believe any app store really worries about this. As far as they make their money, (almost) everything is allowed. Unless they had used your assets, I'd recommend you to forget about it and try either to improve the number of downloads of your app or start a new one (according to what you fell fits better). Good luck.
Yup, you're pretty much spot on. Apple and Google were both actually pretty good with removing the content. I had a few games pulled but I just decided it wasn't worth it and also, those people bought the template, not knowing it was a ripoff of someone else's work. So onwards and upwards
Wow, I worry about the cloning issue, but it's best to see it in a good light to not put you down (as in it's a validation of your good work). Of course, if it's blatant, then try to have store owners remove the content.
The cloning debate could go on forever, honestly. I do think it stings more when a developer feels a newly released game is a clone of their own but I think in many cases, we aren't seeing a lot of true clones as much as rough imitations. (With true clones being stolen art assets and ripped source code or truly misleading reverse engineered products). A lot of ideas are surely copied but I think that's something we built the gaming industry on. Game mechanics and ideas just aren't really something we can consider unique creations after all. We have so many good ideas throughout history that went on to become standard game elements and game ideas that went on to become new subgenres that we simply don't remember that these games came out of elements taken from other games and iterated over time... but the truth is very few ideas are truly original. The ease of release only made the phenomena of cloning more obvious because it can happen much faster and in much greater quantities.
That would be fine if they didn't mysteriously trust the top places at the same time. Mathematically, the more this happens, the more the proper apps lose. Spots are numbered. Even if crap clones don't stay up for long, the problem lies in their sheer quantity and the somewhat artificial push that seems to accompagny a great many of them. You just can't turn a blind eye on this problem, it's absurd. That's why I don't understand the sort of naive statement that focusing on making better apps would be better than taking some time to highlight this issue. It's not like it takes lots of time, and market awareness is extremely important. Much more in fact than simply deciding on making an app. As long as dreck strictly lingers at basement levels, we're OK.
If you make a successful game, cloning dev's will do what they can to ride along with that. I think all you can do is to try and make sure you exploit what most clones miss by definition: inspiration. When you finish a game you have this entire history of thought processes, iterations and prototypes in which you filtered good ideas from bad ideas. You've made all these choices based on trial and error, playtesting and artistic instinct. Cover that in a layer of passion for your product and the end result is bound to have a quality level no clone could ever reach. When Vlambeer's Radical Fishing was cloned they proved this point. As the original designers they were able to raise the bar much much higher than the cloning developer ever could. They could do this because they knew where the original ideas came from, they had tons of new ideas and they had a burning passion about those ideas. The same counts for Threes. They we're cloned by the guys behind 2048, a game that's free but also has a major design flaw and a far less inspired graphic and conceptual design. Even though more people play the clone, Threes managed to become a major financial success because they released a top quality product that took the time to let inspiration do its work. Our original flash game 99 Bricks was cloned and put in the App Store multiple times. One even ripped the graphics of the original flash game. We're about to release our own mobile version, 99 Bricks: Wizard Academy. All we can do is hope we're able to show we know how to make a top quality product out of our ideas.
Were any of the clones successful? To be honest in your situation you didn't make a mobile version, a lot of devs get inspiration for mobile games by looking at flash game. If it hasn't been done on the mobile market or isn't popular they're certainly going to up copy and paste it upfront. So whats keeping people from thinking your game is a tetris clone, seeing as how it has the shapes the only way I could see them not thinking it is if they see gameplay footage as screenshots will only confirm to them it's just tetris. The sad thing is so many of the flappy bird clones didn't even do anything slightly different to make themselves stand out among the other clones. Also Radical Fishing reminds a lot of club penguins fishing game
I guess I wasnt thinking about the devs getting cloned more about the devs wasting their time to cloning. (think flappy, white black square, temple run, etc..) It does suck you got cloned for sure may I ask what your game was that got cloned?
