Discussion on cloning 'has completely stalemated' says Vlambeer pair
Two men representing indie games outfit Vlambeer have urged the industry to raise awareness on game cloning and its potentially harmful effect on livelihoods.
Rami Ismail (pictured, left) and Jan Willem Nijman (right), who both are widely believed to be victims of game cloning themselves, said the industry must not turn a blind eye to the practice.
“We got cloned [at Vlambeer],” Ismail told attendees at GDC.
“That kind of dropped us into a discussion about cloning, but we discovered that a discussion about cloning is kind of dead,” he added.
“Cloning hurts the industry and the discussion on clones has completely stalemated.”
Advertisement
His colleague Nijman warned that, if game plagiarism isn’t tackled, it will “lead to a loss of faith in the industry”.
Nijman said clones stagnate the industry by lowering expectations as similar game concepts are recycled.
“And clones damage people, not just studios,” he added. “A lot of great games designers get fucked over all the time.”
Ismail said the solution to plagiarism is to raise awareness.
The industry shouldn’t merely demonise cloning, he said, but make the practice irrelevant by helping the games market realise its damaging effects.
---
GDC - LIVE! Breaking news, latest news and up-to-the-minute developments: HERE
iPhone owners should download our free app (iTunes link). It puts Develop’s daily must-read online news content – including all the stories from GDC – in the palm of your hand.
For sure plagiarism is more harmful than piracy could ever be, because you're not just losing a sale, you're losing a customer/user/gamer/consumer and consequently gain no word of mouth from your creative idea, whilst the plagiariser has reaped all the financial rewards and become rich off of your idea.
And I feel that it can stiffle innovation by creating a fear of being plagiarised, causing people to focus on less important ideas that won't be a major hit if plagiarised. Who knows what the effects are, but what copy protection is there?
Really the $Bn's that should have paid to the creatives who came up with the idea, so that they can focus on their next creative endeavour, travel the world from the royalties so that they can find new inspirations.
More should be done than raising awareness, game portals should frown upon this and make it more difficult for them to capitalize on it in some way. Or something, but to make this more just.
Very soon you will see these clone companies running out of steam.
If this continues, and noone is making new games, then what happens to gaming.
Look in history at how important it was to protect creative works.
Look at how much we complain about piracy and returned games, when a greater injustice that has measurable effects (in the size of the profit made from the plagiarised game).
Everyone who knows about it knows it's wrong.
** ;-) ... :-p
It hurts and it's happened to me, but if we put strict laws around that we'll end up in a lawsuit universe. Plus this is where progress comes from. Taking an existing idea and turning it into something better.
It strikes me that this issue is one that has grown quickly over recent years because of how easy it is to get the tools to make games, and how available avenues of distribution are in the online sector. I disagree that its a bigger problem than piracy though, piracy is just straight theft however the pirate tries to justify it. In fact I actually think that piracy is a contributor to the rise of plagiarism in games, the piracy rates of software such as 3D studio Max, Maya, and ZBrush is extremely high, it was just another step along the path to move from stealing the tools to stealing the ideas.
I assume the issue the article is talking about though isn't the use of single features which as Trent says has always happened and has created innovation in genres over the years from refreshing those features to avoid stagnation, I believe the issue here is the type of game that takes a succesful idea and then does very little other than renames it and tweak the graphics slightly which seems to be reliant upon the distribution platforms tendency to seemingly allow almost anything through without looking too carefully at it in order to get it making money which they will usually get a cut of.
Software theft and plagiarism is a huge problem, with global losses in the billions of dollars. The answer is simple: software needs to be locked. There are plenty of good solutions to prevent piracy and still have excellent user experiences. If you didn't lock your car, how long do you think it would last before it was stolen? Not long. So lock your car--lock your software.
