There has been a fair amount of press in the past few months about cloned games – and particularly in relation to mobile titles. It’s reached the point that there are going to be a conference talk about the practice.

Mobile is a marketplace that is continually shifting, adapting, and trying out new monetisation techniques, with many developers now giving their game away for free and earning their pay in other ways. There have been a number of articles written about how piracy isn’t a lost sale, and instead of attempting to stamp it out, it should be embraced.

So if piracy is good, why is cloning a game bad?

Schmeconomics

To answer the question, you’re really got to look at economics. And I never thought I’d be writing an article talking about economics. So let’s make it less stressful for both of us, and talk about non-monetary economics.

We’re just going to ignore money all together.

There, that feels better.

There’s more to life than money, after all, and there are certainly other things of value in the business world than money.

Attention and reputation are two of these valuable non-monetary economies.

Celebrities trade on their reputation. Take Lady Gaga (seriously, this post is just sprinting away from my comfort zone). She releases a bunch of songs, and people like them. Because of how our squishy brains work, this means that those people also start to listen to what Lady Gaga says, and they take notice of what she’s doing. A company could now ask Lady Gaga to use her reputation to bring attention to their product.

And that product might not be something they’re expecting you, the squishy-brained Gaga fanatic, to buy directly (though obviously product sponsorship is huge business). Maybe it’s a film, and she is in it. I’m sure her acting skills are without reproach, but even if that weren’t, it would be worth casting Gaga in your film just for the extra attention (and by extension ticket sales) she would bring. Because of her reputation.

If she spoils her reputation within her fan base (maybe by selling her association to too many low-quality products), this impacts her ability to earn.

Attention is valuable in other ways. Why do game developers write blogs? It’s not to riddle them with curious keywords so they can chuckle at the Google searches that lead people there. It’s to get reputation and attention.

Every game development diary is, one way or another, intended to bring the developer (and by association their game) or the game (and by association its developer) to your attention. Whether they want that attention so that you’ll buy their games, or book them for a conference, or hire them, or so that they can use their readership figures to persuade a book publisher to accept their proposal. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is the reputation and attention.

Social media use by companies is pretty much entirely built around the ideas of attention and reputation. Even if I’m not in the market to buy a car, if I see an interesting tweet by Ford (and that may be interesting in the sense that it shows exception customer care, or it’s funny, or thought provoking) and I retweet it, I am giving it the attention of the people who follow me. And maybe one of them is in a car buying state of mind.

And don’t forget that your twitter follower list is built on your reputation. If you keep tweeting things someone doesn’t like, they will stop following you. They are following you because you have a reputation with them for tweeting things they like.

Enough About Gaga, What About Games?

So with those examples in mind, it hopefully becomes a little bit clearer where my reasoning is going.

You can make the best game in the world, but if it receives no attention (i.e. no-one is playing it), then you will not be making money from it. No matter what monetisation model you’re using – be that a one-shot payment on purchase, freemium / free to play, ad-supported – every one of those requires someone other than you to be aware of the game before you can get some income from it.

If you’re doing work for hire then you will most likely need the attention and reputation your previous projects have brought you in order to secure the contract.

Companies thrive off reputation. Names such as Valve, Blizzard, and Bungie are able to leverage a great deal of attention and goodwill towards any new product they announce, based purely on their reputation for making quality games.

This reputation translates straight in to game pre-orders. I think it would be hard to argue that a company or game series with a poor reputation will struggle to drum up pre-orders, whereas something like Call of Duty can break records, based entirely on how much players trust the developers to deliver a game they will enjoy.

It’s interesting (to me at least) that Valve’s Steam is held in generally high regard in the gamer community these days. Whereas the rival service started by EA is treated suspiciously, based on their perceived reputation for over-relying on expensive and meagre DLC. Do you think a Ubisoft could release a viable challenger to Steam, given their current reputation for DRM amongst gamers?

Skip to the End…

So why is cloning a game bad, but pirating it is good?

Piracy takes away the direct monetisation of a game, but the pirate and the game can still help build reputation and attention for legitimate copies.

But cloning takes away all three of the discussed economies – you earn no money from the clone, it splits the attention of your game’s potential market between numerous titles, and it could even sour your reputation if people believe that you are the one making unoriginal riffs on other games.

With almost prescient timing I started writing this article, that mentioned both Nimblebit and Zynga, only a few days before their open letter was published. And being the idiot that I am, I totally failed to take advantage of that and instead took almost another two weeks to finish the thing. And being a double idiot, I then ended up stripping most of the references out in the edit. I’m a game developer, not a journalist.

On the Nimblebit vs Zynga thing, it is interesting that both companies have reputation, though with different audiences. There have been articles and reports written about the lack of loyalty in Zynga’s player-base, suggesting a poor (or no) reputation. I think that’s may be the case, but it’s proven that their players trust the reputation of the games themselves. Zynga regularly puts this to use cross advertising new titles to their existing player-base – it’s how their games can get so many players so quickly, while smaller developers have to struggle to bring attention to their titles. 

I think it’s very good for gaming as a hobby to have a dedicated high street presence (both for visibility and acceptance of the hobby as a mainstream pastime, and also so that grannies and other people can get advice on buying presents), but it’s clear (and has been for a while) that just selling boxed games isn’t enough.

So what would I do if I owned a chain of game stores? What would they contain?

An arcade (of sorts). Featuring the sorts of arcade machines that have experiences that most people just can’t get at home (big sit-in cabinets, lightguns, etc.)

A gaming cafe. Areas with comfortable sofas and big TVs, connected to locally networked and internet enabled consoles, to allow groups to play together. Hosting occasional tournaments and competitions sponsored by game publishers. And with free refreshments. Play any game in the store – and if you buy the game afterwards, you get your play time for free.

A retro museum. (With everything that’s there for sale, obviously.)

All kinds of related merchandise. Strategy guides, art books, fluffy toys, phone cases, game subscription and money cards.

Expert staff. When you go to a butchers and ask about their sausages they don’t look at you bored and say “I dunno, try these pork ones, they’re pretty popular”. Staff should be able to have a knowledgable conversation about gaming, and should be able to recommend obscure (and yes, even retro) games based off your playing preferences.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I watched it. It made me laugh. It made me curious. I went to the app store. It’s £1.49. I bought it.

Conventional wisdom would have it that pricing such a simple game (it’s Frogger, with the controls of Flight Control and some basic time manipulation) shouldn’t be more than 69p.

And then I shared the video. And then I blogged about it.

I know about another game coming up that’s about to have a trailer filmed featuring dogs in hats. I can’t wait!

“All the applications are built in that same way, which is really really nice,” [Pawan Bhardwaj, UK product manager for Xbox Live] pointed out.

“It’s really important. One of the examples I have personally have, on my phone the applications that I download, every single one of them is different, they all work slightly differently, and it gets a bit annoying.”

So does he not have a Windows phone? Or is he saying that he finds his Windows phone a bit annoying because everything works slightly differently?

What I find really impressive is the marketing campaign that’s been created for it – I’ve seen AAA console games that don’t get this kind of exposure.

Fair enough, it doesn’t help that a lot of games I play these days (I would say maybe around 95%) are rented, or downloaded – neither of which come with manuals.

But I haven’t missed the option.

The last two games I bought boxed – Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Batman: Arkham City definitely didn’t have their manuals fingered. They could, in theory, be misprinted in such a way that by pure chance they detail a cure for cancer – and my lazy reliance on in-game tutorials would be damning us all.

I think maybe Fallout 3 was the last one I read, because the game contained all manner numbers in it and abbreviations that I didn’t understand.

Should I have to read a (admittedly slim) book in order to understand a video game – how to play it, how to navigate the menus, the context of the world it takes place in?

Have we reached the point where even the most complex of games is essentially “pick up and play”, in that they will guide me by the hand until I am ready for the training wheels to come off?

Is it better this way, or worse?

(The answer is “better”, by the way, so give yourself a house point if you picked that one.)

Overall it’s a great game, there’s no denying that. It’s generally not quite hit the spot for me as much as its predecessor though. And I think a big chunk of that is the move to an open world.

It’s a tricky situation. On one hand, gamers complain about linearity, “corridor shooters”, and being led by the hand. On the other hand an open world creates great big sections of space that are lacking any meaningful content.

The instinct is to fill that space, often with pretty much anything that roughly fits the theme and style of gameplay. So here we have all kinds of other crimes and villains vying for your attention.

My main problem with this, in the way it’s been implemented here, is that it completely ruins the game’s pacing. Some very slight spoilers follow in the next paragraph to illustrate my point.

Dr Strange is threatening to activate his deadly “Protocol 10″ plan within a few hours. Joker has infected a large amount of Gotham’s population, not to mention Batman himself, with his own poisonous Titan-tinged blood, giving them an expected lifespan of hours. Riddler has kidnapped an emergency medical team, strapping each to traps that he expects Batman to solve before they die. Zsasz has also taken some hostages, and will brutally slay them if he isn’t stopped soon. Deadshot is revealed to be working in Arkham City, assassinating political targets at a steady rate. On top of all of that, an unknown serial killer is cutting the faces off other inmates.

So, that’s the setup you’re presented with. Which is the most important goal? The game heaps side quest upon side quest, each explained as a life-or-death situation. Except hardly any of them are. (To add to the confusion it occasionally it also gives you an actual timed section, which you can fail for being too slow.)

This is the problem with trying to pace an open world game (technically I guess it’s an issue with player agency at all, but an open world makes it even harder to guide). Peaks and troughs are harder to engineer. And that’s even before you get to the “content filling” side quests that not only kill pace but also, I would argue, actually hard the game’s otherwise pretty good characterisation*.

With all of these innocents in danger, is it really in character for Bats to mess around trying to glide through Augmented Reality training hoops? Or to spend fifteen minutes trying to guide a remote Baterang in to hitting a Riddler switch so that he can collect a trophy?

Is it in character for Batman to interrupt his travel to prey on a group of gang members who are standing in the middle of the street, because crippling them (and do keep in mind these guys are already in the middle of a high security prison) will gain him XP so that he can level up and buy new upgrades?

Oh yes, there is gaining XP and levelling up now, so that the inconceivably rich crime fighter can get new gadgets. And only in one case is this new gadget unlock delivered in a way that fits in with the world, rather than just being part of the meta-game’s “oh and now Batman has sonic Baterangs”.

I feel like I should stop there. Writing more makes it sound like I didn’t like the game, which isn’t true. After all, I kept going even through the seemingly random difficulty curve (by far the hardest fight in the game, for me, was at roughly 3/4 of the way through the story – the ending got just easier) and the lack of ability to change the difficulty setting mid-game (struck me as a “designer knows best” bit of bullishness).

* There have been some accusations of sexism, but I am not sure I agree. Certainly, in the very early game there is a lot of “bitch” in the dialogue, primarily from Two Face and his gang. As you continue this drops out completely, with later gang conversations expressing admiration over Harley’s actions and even some degree of concern for Catwoman (“she should be careful in here, some of these thugs haven’t even seen a woman in years”), leading me to believe more and more that the offending dialoge is deliberate characterisation. And having some sexist characters in a game, does not make the game itself sexist.

My main complaint about characterisation is actually in the take on the Penguin as some kind of weird cockney thug with a bottle in his eye, who’s lost any pretence of class and constantly threatens painful torture against his enemies and cronies.

Now since you’re a smarty man, you probably think I’m going to write something like “then today’s your lucky day, because now you can play Run From the Sun on Facebook.”

Well hold on to your butt with both hands, because now you can play Run From the Sun on Facebook in two different ways!

I’ll give you a little bit of a moment here to just read over that last bit again until you’re comfortable with it (you may also want to free up at least one of your hands so that you can click on some links that are coming up).

The two slightly different flavours are: on GameGround’s arcade, where you can take part in tournaments to win actual Facebook Credits (which are like money, that you can spend on all sorts of things in various Facebook shops and games).

The other variation is on Adult Swim’s arcade. Their arcade saves your progress on their servers, which you’ll find very useful if you play on more than one computer (perhaps you like to sneak a game or two during work hours).

Essentially it’s a “rub your tummy and pat your head” timed minigame. With one hand, you have to wiggle your fingers like bait to entice fish up to the Catch Zone where the fisherman will automatically grab them for you. With the other hand you have to shoo away any gulls that will try and fly off with fish that get too close to the surface.

There’s really not much more to it than that!

* Yeah, the Indie Stone situation did make me think about my backups. And not just for work documents, as important as they are – I have years of irreplaceable photos stored away as well.

Though I’ve got my computer Time Machine-ing to a portable drive, and a RAID 1′ed network drive keeping copies of everything important, these are all in the same building. Which is fine for hardware failure, but not so great in the event of dastardly thieves, or acts of God (juggling, etc.)

So I’m going to give CrashPlan a go and see how it works out for me.

Anyway, I hate that RPGs (that’s role playing games, in case you thought I was talking about rocket launchers – which admittedly might happen later in the series if I run out of things) force me to make choices about my character before I’ve even set foot in the world.

Do I want to be a human, or an elf? The elf has higher dexterity, but lower strength. Is that useful? It is going to be a problem for how I play? I’m not even sure how I want to play yet – maybe I will run around hitting people with a sword, or maybe I will use a bow and arrows.

But maybe arrows are really hard to come across.

Or maybe I should focus on social skills and talking my way out of problems? I’ll probably still want to be able to kill enemies occasionally though. Won’t I?

Maybe I could buy my way out of trouble, but I wonder if money will be scarce. I mean, there are skills for crafting stuff here – surely they wouldn’t exist and be offered to me unless resources were abundant and tools were rare, right?

Should I just focus on magic? I’m not sure how magic works.

The point is, right at the start of a game a player has no idea. At all. Yet so many RPGs lock you in to making important character choices at this stage, some of which could really harm the experience you get from the game.

Most of the time I just hammer everything in to whatever skill sounds most like it’ll benefit me for smacking people in the face with a pointy metal stick.