> Of course there is. Get good. Make better games.
That was kind of the article's point. If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours). Especially if you haven't released on all platforms right away, which is extremely difficult to pull off.
And if you market it at all, there could be clones out there before your game is even finished and out there, because you're busy trying to make something good and they're just rushing to get something that looks like the screenshot out there as soon as possible.
> Even better: Make something so crazy that nobody can successfully copy it even it they try, because they can't figure out what makes it work.
So spend 7 years working full-time with employees using money made from a previously successful game to make something like The Witness. Got it.
Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that.
> If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly
How? How on earth are you going to clone a game like Stardew Valley, or Disco Elysium, or Factorio, or No Man's Sky, or Subnautica, or etc etc etc of actual good PC indie games? You're not, not without an enormous amount of effort.
This stuff pretty much only happens to very simple mobile games. When you're talking about actual meaty games, crappy clones are very easily recognized as such.
Factorio has a bunch of games that if not clones, are pretty damn similar to Factorio. I'm playing one right now called Dyson Sphere Program, but there's Satisfactory, Mindustry, Automation Empire, Shapez.io, FactoryIdle.com, and here's one on iOS in particular (since we're talking about mobile games) called Builderment: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/builderment/id1558592038
Disco Elysium is so heavily narrative driven it's not a good candidate for a clone, sure, and also it's not the sort of game that would appeal to a casual app crowd, so it's not a good candidate for being cloned anyway. I guess you found one!
I'm not saying there's nothing out there that can't be cloned, obviously a couple of guys at a clone studio aren't going to crank out a game in a couple of months that has the borderline AAA production values of No Man's Sky. But the point is, neither can most indie developers make those games in the first place either, especially not those that haven't already had a previously (and usually much smaller) successful game first.
Hell, Hello Games couldn't even make No Man's Sky (at least not the first time around, took several years and many apologies to buyers before it finally got to its original vision).
> If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours).
Name it the same as an internet domain you control. Now you hold the keys to the name.
> Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that.
In other words, a fantastic niche to those who can.
That was kind of the article's point. If your game is good enough, it will be cloned, including the name possibly. And then customers will search for it and play the inferior copy (possibly not yours). Especially if you haven't released on all platforms right away, which is extremely difficult to pull off.
And if you market it at all, there could be clones out there before your game is even finished and out there, because you're busy trying to make something good and they're just rushing to get something that looks like the screenshot out there as soon as possible.
> Even better: Make something so crazy that nobody can successfully copy it even it they try, because they can't figure out what makes it work.
So spend 7 years working full-time with employees using money made from a previously successful game to make something like The Witness. Got it.
Don't think there's too many indie developers that have the financial security to manage that.