New ideas that are valuable to the market are by definition worth rewarding so that more of them get created.
Some valuable ideas, however, have difficulty translating release into reward simply because despite their originality and value to society, they are easily copied.
This creates a problem for everyone. Something we all benefit from encouraging, and that pays for itself (in terms of value that it creates), is being disincentivized.
To overcome this hurdle, and achieve a higher economic maxima for both creators and consumers, we have limited (in scope and time) protections for different kinds of valuable but easily copied ideas: patents, trademarks, trade secret, and copyright.
Any situation where valuable creations are being disincentivized, is worth consideration of whether that situation could be changed to everyone's benefit.
Thank you for this. It’s helpful to have a rational, reasonable treatment of intellectual property protection that avoids both extremes of “all information wants to be free” and “piracy is theft.”
I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but creating a clone of a game is completely unrelated to game piracy, and so neither of the extremes you mentioned would apply. They belong in a completely different debate.
Not a fan of Wordle type games, but seeing ads of Wordle, I would say that they are on their top wave and have even been mentioned in TV and the only thing that is left for them is going down - all the way down - their downfall has started and it is inevitable.
It is path of all the mobile games, because people are morons and their interest will peak on something else, so it is not clones that will be taking their popularity, but boredom of people.
Any mobile app has ~2 year lifetime on market, unless it is significantly updated and changed to the point, that it is not the same when it was released first.
Currently I am playing couple of 5 year old mobile games - one of them I am playing for 3 years and joined when it was in process of neglect. Another one I started to play 6 months ago and it was "dead" for past 3,5 years now, as it had no events and nothing new added - it was too expensive for a company to employ devs just to fix bugs!
Lifetime of Wordle will be under those 2 years, because it looks very simple concept and there is nothing that can improve it, so it is doomed for even shorter lifetime, than anything that was released before.
Mobile gaming is cancer - it is not clones that are killing successful games, but loss of interest in public, that has a short attention span.... oh look, a shiny thing, kthnxbye.
Over past 2 years I went through 10+ mobile games. They were all very beatufuly done and all of them stole my time and it took tremendous amount for me to get rid of them, because I got addicted to them, so pardon my cynic view on this, but I don't care at all for Wordle and the public free advertisement of another cancer game.
Mobile market has created wide access that was not something available to game devs in past - that's why there were game publishers. The speed of gaining market also is significantly faster. So, when devs complain about market speed slowing down - it is not because of clones.
Clones apparently are appealing to completelly different market segment, than what "original" aimed at. It is erroneous to assume, that it was their market in first place!
Ideas are sh!t and means nothing!
If you have an idea - that means, that someone else(in counts of 100s or 1000s) have the same idea already, or someone else in past had that idea. There has been examples of similar products developed independently at the same time, so they might have looked like clones but they are not always clones. So, claiming that ideas are unique and should be somewhat appropriately rewarded... phew!
I can relate to the frustrations that are described in article, but at the same time I can't understand if the people that complain have no brains, if they had not foreseen this outcome and did not calculated for how long they will get profit from their product - which was not forever in the first place!!!
PS If you are an indie developer, you should educate yourself at least in basic level of marketing, law and business. And after that decide if indie development is for you and if you have a killing insticts of a shark or you are going to be food.
