> if your idea is copied so easily and consumers apparently can’t team the difference between your game and a clone, do you really have a viable product or were you just the first person to think of an easily commoditized idea?
You're diminishing the amount of research and effort that is frequently required to realise an easily commoditized idea. This is why patents exist.
Original game ideas are the product of thousands of hours of experimentation and playtesting. All of that time, effort, and creativity produces a fun mechanic which can often be cloned with ease.
Would you be saying this if we were talking about a non-entertainment product?
What if we were discussing, hypothetically, a novel user interface for medical software which a startup produced after conducting thousands of interviews with doctors across the globe? And then a better funded competitor got their hands on a copy of the software and just replicated the screens in a few weeks?
Or an AI research startup that spent years working on an innovative new model, only for a customer to yoink all the parameters/weights/configuration/whatever and release a competing product backed by a large company?
Are you arguing that patents should be applicable to games? The problem with that is that people will spend thousands of hours on experimentation and playtesting and then the patent system will swoop in the day after release and tell them they aren't actually allowed to release the thing they invented and created themselves.
I wasn't arguing for game mechanic patents, I was using the existence of patents as evidence that we've recognized the problem of "person A invests massively in researching something new, person B just copies them and wins in the market" and tried to solve it.
Indeed, copyright and licensing are similar attempts to solve this problem. Indie devs tend to lack the resources to litigate with cloners, though.
If you have something patentable, you might want to patent it.
> Original game ideas are the product of thousands of hours of experimentation and playtesting. All of that time, effort, and creativity produces a fun mechanic which can often be cloned with ease.
This is no different than any product, right? If your selling point is so easily copied (and not patentable), it’ll be hard to compete. You need something more than that. It might be good marketing, the right characters, good writing, or even just a good community.
I’m not trying to trivialize the effort devs put in. But unless we’re talking about patenting abstract things like game mechanics, you need something more than just good game mechanics to be commercially successful.
Music, sounds, and other art assets are trivially copied but you don't seem to be OK with that.
What's different to you about the specific combination of numbers that makes Mario's movement fun vs. the specific combination of 3 notes and rhythm that makes the bassline from Psycho Killer catchy?
You're diminishing the amount of research and effort that is frequently required to realise an easily commoditized idea. This is why patents exist.
Original game ideas are the product of thousands of hours of experimentation and playtesting. All of that time, effort, and creativity produces a fun mechanic which can often be cloned with ease.
Would you be saying this if we were talking about a non-entertainment product?
What if we were discussing, hypothetically, a novel user interface for medical software which a startup produced after conducting thousands of interviews with doctors across the globe? And then a better funded competitor got their hands on a copy of the software and just replicated the screens in a few weeks?
Or an AI research startup that spent years working on an innovative new model, only for a customer to yoink all the parameters/weights/configuration/whatever and release a competing product backed by a large company?