It seems like you're more offended because the project directly promotes his for profit work rather than how he's using someone elses IP without permission.
If he called it a PoP clone, and didn't re-use the sprites, I feel like you'd still be a little mad.
Just playing devil's advocate though, I otherwise agree with you.
That is correct. I grew up exposed to a lot of casual IP violation in the indie game making scene and RPG Maker community, so I'm willing to tolerate a lot. The huge ad on the right and the layout of the author's consulting page is what upsets me the most.
Game clones are a pretty sticky subject as well but I feel like they at least have a long, defensible history in the genre and sometimes clones help advance the state of the art (even if you have cases like Dream Heights or Ninja Fishing where a clone has inflicted real and obvious harm on an indie developer).
>a lot of casual IP violation in the indie game making scene and RPG Maker community
The RPG Maker community in the West pretty much started with an unofficial (i.e., illegal) translation of RPG Maker 95 and 2000 into English by a Russian hacker. It's a interesting ethical conundrum to consider: we likely owe most of the great (and not so great) games made with those tools to the wide, illegal, availability of the tools themselves and their default art assets that provided a foundation one could built upon [1].
Perhaps this could be solved by either having a broad enough library of liberally licensed assets (the problem with those would be games that use them looking unoriginal are their use spreads) or a Ted Nelson-style system of transclusion [2] where you could reuse other people's content that would automatically give part of your profit from page views to them. The latter only covers compensation for copyright, obviously. When you get to trademarks it gets a lot more murky.
[1] One of the most well-known RPG Maker games is A Blurred Line (http://rpgmaker.net/games/92/). It offers a example of just what a solo developer can do with premade art assets and great storytelling (as evidenced by the fact that years later people are still asking for the final episode to be made).
http://opengameart.org/ seems to be a neat effort to provide that kind of public domain art.
Don Miguel's translations of RM95 and 2k are an interesting note for sure. They helped create and grow a market that the developers of RPG Maker now successfully sell to via Steam and other audiences with the latest versions of their product, and I'm sure the developers didn't have the resources to target that market at the time. Regardless, they were still illegal...
I'm really glad that community existed, either way. It was a pleasure to get to know some of the more brilliant developers and see them move onto bigger and better things. A Blurred Line's developer was snapped up by Turbine to work on games like LOTRO - hard work well rewarded, in my opinion, since he built a ton of really well-crafted, interesting games. I look back on the year or two I spent helping run rpgmaker.net pretty fondly, even if they were a harsh introduction to the real nature of the internet (remember eFront?)
> http://opengameart.org/ seems to be a neat effort to provide that kind of public domain art.
I like OpenGameArt and I hope to see it really prosper but right now it's still relatively small, at the industry scale.
I wonder if something like OpenGameArt could disrupt how smaller/indie games are made if it grew to a critical mass of art assets. Certainly, a clever developer can do a lot with what's already there, but imagine if there were dozens upon dozens of complete, consistent sets of art covering everything you might need to make a game of a given genre there. Perhaps we'd get a lot of identical-looking games competing on mechanics alone for the right to be the "definitive" game to use this or that tileset, sprite set, etc. I wouldn't mind seeing that.
>They helped create and grow a market that the developers of RPG Maker now successfully sell to via Steam and other audiences with the latest versions of their product
Looks like it's played out like a Microsoft-type strategy for them, whether deliberately or not. A lot of kids from who cut their teeth on doing horrible things to pirated copies of Windows 9x, NT 4.0 or 2000 are now Microsoft's paying customers. I think Gates talks about this in an interview somewhere.
>A Blurred Line's developer was snapped up by Turbine to work on games like LOTRO
That's good to hear. Although it probably means that the rumors of him secretly developing a remake/continuation of A Blurred Line are not to materialize.
>I look back on the year or two I spent helping run rpgmaker.net pretty fondly, even if they were a harsh introduction to the real nature of the internet (remember eFront?)
I participated in smaller, "local" RPG Maker communities and was mostly read-only in the larger ones but they were a constant source of discussion, art assets, tips and, of course, new games. With that in mind I have to thank you for contributing your part. It was certainly an interesting environment for a young aspiring game developer to be in.
On a sad note, too bad all such communities (and I don't just mean individual website or forums) eventually peter out. I feel that a lot of game development expertise disappears with them. Maybe a constantly evolving (free and open source?) game making tool could gather a similar community around it that would then last longer.
If he called it a PoP clone, and didn't re-use the sprites, I feel like you'd still be a little mad.
Just playing devil's advocate though, I otherwise agree with you.