Comment Re:This doesn't compute...or does it (Score 2) 113
Then I thought, well perhaps designer spends years designing a game with all sorts of clever ideas then copiers use them all a few days after release. I have to ask, though, is this what happens?
What happens is that the developer has dozens of ideas, and the 30th one actually works. People like it; people play it. It has the right "stuff" that it becomes a success. Finding that combination is what takes years. Actually producing that one game may have only taken the amount of time it takes a copier.
Although tuning very well also takes a lot of time.
Surely a game must spend some time before becoming popular enough to copy, during which it builds a following and has first mover advantage. Copiers can't copy those advantages
Well, I mean, Candy Crush is a cheap knockoff. Sometimes, marketing muscle beats out organic growth. Hell, Zynga used to threaten (and follow through on threats to) to just clone games if they would not sell, and then popularize the Zynga version through their marketing. They then would crush the original.
Hell, there are lists, both in games and in the world, where people think that the original is a cheap knockoff.
My favorite example is Hydrox vs. Oreo, but numerous others exist.