Free cheese not only in a mousetrap
Perhaps it’s important to decide right away: a computer or console game
A textbook example is the mobile game Threes.You may not have heard of it, but you definitely know the popular browser game 2048. Sirvo, an indie developer of Threes, has been polishing the mechanics of moving tiles with numbers for more than a year. After the first release of Threes, 15 clones of the game began to appear per day, including 2048.
The game was written by the developer in less than two daysGabriele Cirulli - He released an app with similar mechanics, simplified down to basic principles. Most importantly, Threes was $ 1.99 and 2048 was originally free. As a result, the primitive mechanics of 2048 hit the top. The developers tried to remove clones from the marketplaces, wrote public angry letters, but in the end they resigned themselves to defeat.
War with the Mills
The heat between 2048 and Threes is not the mostbloody example of "war" over intellectual property in the gaming industry. It becomes like medieval battles when corporations get involved. Game designer Ben Esposito spent five years working on Donut County, an indie game in which the user controls a hole that absorbs objects while growing. The more objects fall, the larger the hole becomes. The mechanics are simple but addictive: in 2018 Donut County was the iPhone game of the year. As with Threes, Ben tried to monetize his five-year work by selling the game - on a Mac, it costs $ 12.99. About a year after the announcement, hyper-casual game company Voodoo released hole.io. The online game is built entirely on Ben's mechanics, but simplifies it - there is no plot, no thoughtful characters. Only a hole that absorbs objects.
Another difference: hole.io has raised $ 200 million in investment from Goldman Sachs for "exciting vision, game variability and innovation." According to Voodoo, by vision, investors meant aggressive buying of large-scale advertising purchases. From a legal point of view, Voodoo is innocent - they "danced" around Ben's ideas and mechanics, which are not his full intellectual property. It would be possible to sue if hole.io had sounds, pictures, dialogues, or names from Donut County.
Voodoo uses this professionallyloophole and "cuts" other people's mechanics. Other games released by Voodoo include Flappy Dunk !, Rolly Vortex or The Fish Master. These are clones of Flappy Bird, Rolling Sky, Ridiculous Fishing. A well-established distribution network and proven ways of keeping attention make them "Robin Hoods" in the eyes of the gaming community, who simply publish good games for free. To play, you just need to watch a few commercials. If you bring this into a creative plane, then Voodoo engages in creative abuse with impunity.
Your startup, only better
A well-trodden path of small studios, along whichThe developers of both Threes and Donut County were involved in participation in festivals and PR work. To attract audiences and make money, they announce game mechanics in trailers even before receiving a patent. This is where industry sharks come in the form of large companies. They steal the product at the software level: due to the fact that they have larger budgets and teams, they can get the finished result much faster.
This is often the point of hyper-casual games -turn someone else's interesting mechanics into a way to attract users to view ads. Such games are considered successful if the player watches several short commercials: there is no need to hold him any further.
Unlike other creative industries, games arethe segment is quite young. Lawyers pretend that the final product is software, not ideas like a well-thought-out plot or a game universe: they just don't cost anything. Even if indie developers try to sue, the whole process follows the rules of the IT market. Plus, the big players keep a whole staff of lawyers and end up winning. It remains for small studios to either move to large corporations, or to accept the risk of losing a creative product.
Beaten track of Last of Us and GTA, movies and rework
The other side of the coin is serial reproductionhigh-budget projects with an established audience, such as Last of Us or GTA. These projects, on the contrary, are very careful about new mechanics and ideas - they do not invent original gameplay. The majority of their players don't need anything new - they don't want to deal with the changes. People buy such games just to have a good weekend in an understandable and cinematic world.
By the way, about the movie:such projects usually sell the idea of games as interactive films. They work on drama, not mechanics, and build on storytelling as the core element of the new game. So, now Sony is talking about Ghost of Tsushima - a game about the Japanese Edo era. Throughout the presentation, the developers talked about how they built the game as an homage to the films of Akira Kurosawa: black and white film, a similar composition of frames, and so on.
A similar story was in L. A. Noire. On the anniversary of the release, the developers have released a black and white version. They added a new filter and the game once again caused a stir among users. Due to serial production, such projects generally do not have plagiarism problems. Big-budget games are not competing with indie studios, but with movies. So, in 2019, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in a letter to shareholders said that the main competitor of the service is not Disney + or HBO, but the computer game Fortnite.
However, there are ethical issues withingaming corporations. An active segment of the gamer audience, which is demanding about the smallest details in update releases, correlates the product with their ideas about the ideal game. The community ethics is perverted - it forces developers to push the product to perfection in a short time. Statements by studios that the game creators reworked on the project often become a standard of quality among gamers. Thus, Rockstar Games creates the image of developers as faceless assistants who can be hired and fired in batches. They work until they're exhausted until they make a great product.
Industry problems in Russia and forgetting names
Perhaps one of the key problems of the Russiangame development is embedded in our cultural code. We have a common idea of craftsmanship - a lone genius who has been working on a product for years to come up with an ingenious solution. But these notions often hurt budding game designers. They spend a lot of time working on one large-scale game, instead of quickly gaining experience on smaller projects, so it's hard to talk about any community of budding independent developers: in general, they want to sit alone and work on their projects themselves, without receiving help from outside. They have an idea that you need deep vision and unique mechanics - that is, a unique creative product. The misconception that a great game sells itself is ingrained in the minds of our game development teams.
However, there are Russian developers,which are making notable software breakthroughs: you've probably seen an ad for Gardenscapes. It is made by Playrix, one of the most prominent companies in the global mobile application development market. Their invention is not a unique and new mechanic for games of the genre Match 3 ("three in a row"), but marketing. In their Instagram Story ads, they do not show an existing game, but fragments of fictional games that, according to their calculations, people would like to play. And it works: Gardenscapes is now the most popular game of the genre in Europe after Candy Crush Saga.
Another way to make money on the mobile market isadaptation of the same successful mechanics to the needs of large companies. There are studios that make the same games under the brand of different companies, sometimes without advertising their participation at all. Players think that companies are copying each other's games, but in fact the studio uses the same engine, developments and team to change the pictures in the game every two months and sell it to a large company again.
There is a problem with these methods of survivalerasing the names of game designers. Games work not as a creative product, but as a software product. Nobody knows the developers of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. The same situation happens with most games.
The problems of the gaming industry are associated with itsyouth - ethical norms and even the very definition of plagiarism has not yet been established in it. The dual nature of computer games also complicates this process. On the one hand, it is an IT product like Microsoft Office or other computer programs. On the other hand, the creative component cannot be taken away from games. For many developers, they become the new medium for storytelling, like movies and TV shows.
Unlike other creative industries withestablished anti-copying practices, there are many loopholes in the legal framework for copying game mechanics. I would like to believe that these problems will soon become a thing of the past. Judicial practice is already developing new definitions of plagiarism. This means that in the future, developers will be able to calmly resist both copying and erasure of their names.
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