From the article:
"currently, there’s only one “Flappy Bird” knock-off in the top 20 on the iTunes App Store"
Hard to take an article seriously when it unironically and somewhat derisively references Flappy Bird knock-offs considering Flappy Bird itself is a pretty direct knock-off of Piou Piou:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.pioupiou&h...
Which itself is more arguably a knock-off of Helicopter Game, which is a dumbed down 1 button linear-rails horizontal version of Lunar Lander... and so on.
I mean, hell, 1024's marketing copy literally says "no need to pay for ThreesGames." https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1024!/id823499224
There is one substantive gameplay difference between Threes and ArbitraryPowerOfTwo.
In Threes, a swipe moves the game board one square.
In ArbitraryPowerOfTwo, a swipe applies gravity to the game board in the swipe's direction until it settles.
I've played both, and that difference does not significantly affect gameplay or strategy.
The numbers on the tiles are not a serious mechanical difference.
They state there's only one Flappy Bird clone in the top 20 on iTunes, but look at the rest of what's there. If you're going to be concerned about games that are clones/copies of what's essentially pre-existing game mechanics, you might want to think about how little comes through that's actually original in any respect.
City builders, TCG's, match 3, slot machines... and we've covered the vast majority of popular apps. Go a little further and you have hidden item games, runners, etc.
The only reason it's so obvious with games like Flappy Bird and 2048 is that the mechanic is so simple and requires so little in terms of effort and resources that anyone with even an elementary skill set on a mobile platform can throw together one of these clones and puke it onto the internet to ride the wave (or at least the foam, as most of them never even get into the surf).
Or maybe since the inception of gaming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game http://www.pong-story.com/mypongs.htm http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/asteroids-variants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_(video_game)#Clones (etc.)
I mean, does anybody remember battle chess? Did people say "yeah, nice little rip off. Chess has been around for so long. How about something original? Just adding the Battle animation is not really innovative, is it?"
I have no problem with ideas of games being used to make their own implementation. As long as it is not a 1:1 copy simply to try and dupe people into buying your thinking they would be buying the original.
OMG I just found out that people are writing simple free apps and some other people are trying to earn money on extremely simple apps?
I actually found all those flappy clones happening great. Of course there is nothing useful about them. It is just that I like idea of people building things just for fun and for the heck of it. Kind of like when musicians improvise together or when aspiring writer play those cooperative writing stories. Except with small simple games.
Basically, it is meme web 2.0 version.
Me too. I especially liked the clones that built upon the basic game play of Flappy Bird (single-finger control of vertical impulses) but added additional challenge, like Heli Math (solve math problems to fly through the gap).
I was especially amused at the line "A search in the iTunes App Store today reveals just what this latest gold rush looks like..." Of course, since these games are all free I don't think they're rushing towards a lot of gold.
This is still a big problem Apple has though. I have a hard time with the whole "curated app store" thing when nearly every search turns up screen after screen of low quality copy-cat garbage. How long was Pokemon Yellow on the store before it finally got pulled? How many 'strategy guides' and 'Angry Falcons' and 'Crash of Clans' are there?
Making 1024 and putting something akin to 'Why waste money on Threes, here's a copy' in the app description was just classless though. I don't see any redeeming value in that.
Additionally, from the article: "For the makers of “Threes,” the good news is that the emergence of the clones hasn’t decimated its market share – the app is still a Top 10 title in Puzzle Games, Card Games and the general Games category in the U.S. and a top 20 Overall app on the U.S. App Store. (All Paid rankings, which, to be fair, is less competitive than the Free ranks.)"
It's also important to note that just because I played doge2048 for a few hours doesn't mean that I would have been willing to pay $2 for Threes. 2048 and it's variations exposed me to his idea, but did not cost him my purchase.
When you choose to do closed source software that's the trade-off you're making.
Also, most of this has been on github, which has nothing to do with app stores anyway.
Programmers seem to like these games with simple rules. This is not a new phenomena just look at the history of Life. When the code is open (e.g. 2048) it tends to allow for a lot of experimentation.
All that being said, I don't think 2048 is a Threes clone since it has a different feel and works by different rules.
1) I'm not saying the clone will be as good
Simply matching up like tiles in 2048 gets you further than only randomly moving. Then trying to put the largest sums in sorted order along one edge gets you further, but very rarely results in winning. Then by developing strategies about when to move the mass of tiles toward a single tile and when to move a single tile toward a mass, or setting up paths that are longer than the 4 tile length edge, I can win about half the time (or maybe a quarter).
Complexity that arises from simple rules is may he easier to program than the complex behavior directly, but I think you're on to something about those games being popular with people who program.
(Also, since I'm suspicious about the placement of stories about games going viral, I kind of enjoy the conceit of a narrative that the virality of these games is less organic. Is it really because they are derivative, or because trusted sources are saying they are knockoffs rather than, "You should try this!")
Flappy jam: http://itch.io/jam/flappyjam
http://logarithmic-flappy-2048.ajf.me/
Though my Logarithmic Flappy 2048 was just Flappy 2048 with Math.pow(2) applied to all the draw calls. I deserve no credit.
EDIT: Oh great, now I'm being attributed as creating Flappy 2048 :(
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/some-mad-genius-combined-flappy-b...
EDIT 2: Wow, Google Play already! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.Ofear.Flapp...
I rewrote the whole game's code as an exercice soon after it was released, and took special care in using CSS transforms and not creating/forgetting javascript objects constantly (I wish I knew if that last point made a difference in performance on mobile, but I wouln't know how to measure it). I also added a tutorial screen and an animation for a forbidden move.
That's why I can personally recommend my ad-free clone ('shameless plug' and all that), that you can find here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.erwan.game... or by searching "2+2=2048" in the play store/windows phone store. The swiping mechanic works great with it, so please tell me if you find any issues with it.
If only we could peek into its core dumps. The isolation of having existed for so long on a single ISDN line must have been maddening. It might have finished Emacs 25, even!
They also made a handful of games that were successful, several that went through very public controversy about being copied from someone else; several that have been stolen quite blatantly (with the original developers nicknames in the function calls). That cycle hasn't stopped there: reverse-engineered a game for cheap, etc. I won’t give details because I don’t like talking to lawyers, but all was as transparent as those things can be.
I’ll say here what I said then: if someone steals from you, there's always a slight difference that could be an improvement, take that; otherwise, every game has its own history. Learn and let it be.
This slide/move difference actually has massive effects on gameplay as it means there are situations you can get into while playing 2048 that are difficult or even impossible to recover from that you can easily extricate yourself from while playing Threes. To make up for this, the way you have to match 1s and 2s together (as opposed to simply matching the values, as you can in 2048) makes organizing the lowest level of the board slightly more complicated.
I frankly bet if we asked the developer of Threes about the 1st and 2st thing he'd say he toyed with the idea of a game where the matching was more direct (as its pretty obvious consider it) and realized that it felt "too easy": the only thing making 2048 continue to be difficult is the lack of explicit control over the tiles; though, that also makes it easier, as you can move items much more quickly around the board without more clutter appearing.
I would say this is similar to how in Tetris Attack you can horizontally swap any two tiles, but in Bejeweled you can swap tiles vertically or horizontally, but only temporarily: they have effectively the same mechanic (you need to match tiles of similar color), the same overall physics (items drop to fill in gaps), the same kinds of tactics, but the amount of control you have over the game board and what moves you have are quite different in feel due to the seemingly minor control changes.
(FWIW, I find Tetris Attack and 2048 "fun", and I find Bejeweled and Threes "infuriating". This is likely somewhat to do with the fact that I find Tetris Attack and 2048 "easier" than Bejeweled and Threes, but I would hope that it is more to do with some of the things I really enjoyed about Tetris Attack--the speed of movement, the building of structure, and the intricacy of "skill chains"--not being tactically relevant in Bejeweled, and in the case of Threes that the 1s and 2s are randomized in such a way where I often feel "this game isn't even winnable: I have a board full of 1s... this isn't even fair", which is a situation fundamentally impossible in 2048.)