作者：Psychochild

我最近参加了一个关于社交游戏和手机游戏的研讨会，会上引出了许多关于山寨游戏的话题。我们今天将讨论山寨游戏的真实现状以及它们对小型游戏公司的影响。

案例

山寨游戏问题之所以再次被搬上讨论台主要是因为两个热点事件。一个是独立开发商NimbleBit指责Zynga的新游戏抄袭了他们的《Tiny Tower》。NimbleBit采取的是较为轻松的方法，甚至对Zynga“认可”自己的作品表示感激。他们同样还指出，自己只是一家仅有3名员工的小公司，比不上拥有上千名员工的Zynga。但是最近Twitter上的一条信息表明，并不是所有人都能以如此轻松的态度对待这种山寨行为——“即使你拒绝为Zynga做事，但是有时候你的所有努力也会变成Zynga的囊中之物。”这是NimbleBit游戏的忠实玩家发布的一个贴子，旨在支持该开发商并希望公众能够更多地关注该公司以及他们的游戏。

dear zynga(from ndiegames.com)

而另外一则新闻是关于Spry Fox对6waves Lolapps（6L）的诉讼。诉讼原因是6L抄袭了Spry Fox的游戏《Triple Town》；有传闻称这两家公司之前签订了机密协议，Spry Fox有意与6L展开合作因此让后者接触了关于该游戏的一些机密信息。

山寨游戏的本质

在我所参加的会议中，有一个关于社交游戏开发趋势的议题。而其中一名参加者便是具有深刻见解的开发者Brenda Brathwaite——她为当今越来越普遍的游戏复制行为感到惋惜，并且她还说道在进入社交游戏和手机游戏领域之前根本就没听过“快速遵循”这个术语。快速遵循是指“借鉴”其它公司的游戏理念并利用这些游戏的竞争优势（如发行渠道或用户基础等）而获得成功。而游戏中的快速遵循便是指借鉴别人的核心游戏理念，加以执行，并挖掘其现有的用户基础或利用市场营销工具获得更多用户。

Brenda还指出，复制游戏存在的最大问题便是过分强调游戏理念。以前我曾经抱怨过游戏产业太过隐秘，而现在这种情况更是进一步恶化。当开发者担心自己的理念被其它拥有更多资源的大公司所窃取时，他们就更不愿意与别人交流自己的想法（直到自己的能够独立制作出游戏为止）。另一方面，过度隐藏自己的游戏理念则让开发者很难公开且有针对性地测试这一想法。我们必须尽可能地与别人分享自己的理念，因为在此过程中你会发现，那些真心愿意帮助你的人远远多于缺乏创造性而想要跟一家小公司争抢想法的人。

山寨行为历史悠久？

有些人认为，山寨现象在游戏产业中已经存在一段历史了。但是Brenda指出这次的情况并不相同：以《毁灭战士》为例，如果你想要复制一款游戏，你就需要改造游戏的技术基础。因为其他程序员并非John Carmack，他们不得不利用不同的技术决策，创造出不同的设计方法。而在新的设计决策上添加一个新的主题便能够让游戏变成是相同题材的不同游戏，而不只是纯粹地复制游戏。

但是不幸的是，这个领域中出现了越来越多统一的平台以及稳定的代码库，所以任何游戏都很难在技术方面表现突出。当你知晓制作一款游戏的基础要素是什么后，你便能够轻松地制作（较为粗糙）出一款新游戏。大多数社交游戏和手机游戏都致力于吸引更多用户，所以它们的主题都会围绕一些众所周知的内容，如在一个现代或童话背景中设置一些卡通角色，或者基于这条故事轴进行其它延伸。所以结果便是，受其它游戏启发的游戏必然也会跟之前的游戏非常相似。

新商机

对于开发者来说这意味着什么？我们再一次看到了商机对于设计的影响，但是这却是大多数人的选择。就像我之前说道的，创新也是一种风险，而优化则是创新的对立面，这是我评判任何事物的标准。而我们又能从中吸取何种经验？

你需要尽量快速发展。在我以前关于山寨游戏的文章中，我曾经以QCF的《Desktop Dungeons》为例，解析这款游戏遭遇了何种山寨行为以及最终如何出现于iPhone平台上。一年前这款游戏发行于一个平台上，但是其改善速度却非常慢，导致其它公司抓住机会而“借鉴”了游戏的核心理念，并创造出新游戏推向其它平台。出现更具有攻击性的模仿者要求你需要越快速地发展，尽快在多个平台上推出你的游戏。如果你不希望其他人染指你的市场，你就需要重视执行力。显然，这对于小型公司来说非常困难。

简单的游戏更危险。虽然我很欣赏简单的游戏设计，但是我同样也意识到设计一款优秀的简单游戏需要投入多少努力。因为简单游戏更容易被复制，所以简单游戏的开发者需要面临更高的执行风险。就像最初针对于Kindle设备而设计的游戏《Triple Town》就比《Storybricks》（游戏邦注：该游戏尽管设计初衷是让玩家轻松游戏，但是其中却隐藏了许多复杂的游戏机制）简单多了。不幸的是，抛弃了简单性的社交游戏和手机游戏将会变得越来越像传统游戏，这也意味着它们将失去原本超越传统游戏的优势。

诉讼现象或将更加普遍。就像Spry Fox对6waves Lolapps的控告也只是冰山一角。如果人们更关注与结果，那么今后这种诉讼可能会越来越多。其中的不利因素就在于诉讼所需要的成本和时间。因为卷入诉讼案件的开发者会发现，他们真正投入游戏开发中的时间会变得越来越少。更糟糕的是，小型游戏开发者也会发现，他们没有足够的资金与大公司对簿公堂。最后，这些公司也许就会只专注于开发更多游戏，而不再纠结于潜在的山寨行为。我们可能还将看到一些开发商像NimbleBit一样试图通过“民意审判”为自己扳回一局。总之不管怎样，当你自己在经营一家游戏公司时，都必须警惕这一风险。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Clones… clones everywhere!

I recently attended a conference on social and mobile games (yeah, I know) and they talked a bit about cloning of games. Again. A few high-profile examples of cloning have brought this back into the spotlight. So, let’s take a look at the business realities of cloning and how it affect small game companies.

I say “again” because I wrote about cloning a bit over a year ago. Since then, it’s just continued to become a bigger issue in the game industry.

More aggressive cloners

There were two major events recently that brought the cloning issue to the forefront of game discussions. The first was a humorous note from developers NimbleBit pointing out how a new Zynga game looks quite a bit like their existing game. They take a rather jovial approach, thanking Zynga for being such obvious fans of their work. They also point out that they are merely 3 people compared to Zynga’s thousands of employees. Now, it’s perhaps not all light-hearted fun as a recent tweet might indicate: “Even when you refuse to go work for Zynga, sometimes you end up doing work for Zynga anyway.” But, the original image inspired fans to post in support of the developers and bring some more attention to them and their games.

The other major news was a lawsuit by Spry Fox against developer 6waves Lolapps (6L). The lawsuit (downloadable in PDF format from that link) alleges that 6L cloned Spry Fox’s game Triple Town; further, the two parties were under a confidentiality agreement and 6L had confidential access to inside information that Spry Fox provided in anticipation of a partnership. Certainly suspicious if the accusations are correct.

The face of modern clones

At the conference i was at, one of the talks was about Trends in Social Game Product Development. One of the panelists was the ever insightful Brenda Brathwaite, a developer known for her honesty. She lamented that cloning was becoming much more common, saying that she had never heard the term “Fast Follow” until she got into social and mobile games. Fast follow is taking an idea from another company and using other competitive advantages (distribution, customer base, etc.) to get ahead. For games, that means taking a core game concept, executing it well enough, then tapping into your existing user base or marketing machine to gain more users. (Note that this seems to be a perfectly valid business strategy, it’s just that we tend to have a different perspective when the idea being duplicated is a creative effort instead of something less emotional like a business model.)

The biggest problem, as Brenda points out, is that this puts a lot more emphasis on the idea. I’ve previously lamented how secretive the games industry tends to be, and this only exacerbates the problem. If you worry that your idea is going to get ripped off by a larger company who has more resources than you do, it becomes better to not discuss the idea until you can execute on it to the best extent you can. On the other hand, it becomes harder to test out ideas in the open and smaller shops might have trouble executing at all if they are too secretive. The old recommendation in the past was to share your idea as much as possible, as you were more likely to find people who wanted to help you rather than someone so creatively stunted they had to nab ideas from a small company.

Haven’t we always had cloning?

Some people will argue that there has always been cloning in the game industry. But, in a discussion after the panel, Brenda pointed out how it’s different this time around: using DOOM as an example, she pointed out that if you wanted to clone a game, you had to re-create the tech base. Since most programmers weren’t John Carmack, they had to make different tech decisions which lead to different design decisions. Add a new theme on top of these new design decisions and the games felt more like different games in the same genre rather than just clones of each other.

Unfortunately, in this area of more unified platforms and stable code libraries, you don’t have quite so much diversity in the technology part. Once you’ve got the basis for making one game, you can crank out a new game pretty easily. With most social and mobile games aiming for a wider audience, the theme is going to fall within a few fairly well-known areas: a modern or fairytale setting with cutesy or cartoony character, or something along those lines. As a result, a game inspired by another is going to look awfully similar.

New business realities

What does this mean for a game developer? Once again, we see that business reality intrudes upon design despite what most people would prefer. As I’ve written before, innovation is risk, and polish is the opposite of innovation, so I’m looking at things through this lens. What lessons can you learn from all this?

Move as fast as you can. In my previous post about clones, I referenced the story about how QCF’s Desktop Dungeons had been cloned and put on the iPhone. Even a year ago we saw that releasing on one platform and slowly improving gave another company the opportunity to take your core game idea and move it to a new platform. Unfortunately, the more aggressive cloners mean that you need to move as fast as you can to establish your games on multiple platforms. Execution matters a lot if you don’t want someone else to move in on your territory. Obviously, this is tough for smaller companies to do.

Simple games are riskier. As much as I can admire a simple design, and as much as I realize how much blood, sweat, and tears goes into making an elegantly simple design, the fact remains that simple games are easier to clone, and therefore riskier to implement. A game like Triple Town that was originally designed to run on the Kindle is going to be easier than Storybricks, a system that is designed to be simple to use but that has a lot of very complex mechanics under the surface. Unfortunately, a move away from simplicity means that many social and mobile games will start to resemble more traditional games, which means they will lose some of their advantages over traditional games. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.

Lawsuits might become more common. The lawsuit that Spry Fox is bringing against 6waves Lolapps might be the tip of the iceberg. Depending on how the results, lawsuits might become a lot more common. The downside is that lawsuits are costly both in terms of money and time. A developer who gets involved in a lawsuit might find the time they have less time to spend on actually making games. Worse, a small developer might find they don’t have the financial resources to take on a company with deep pockets that can drag out a court case. Ultimately, it might make more sense to just focus on making more games rather than taking on potential clones. We might also see some developers trying to win points with the “court of public opinion” as NimbleBit did with the image I linked above. At any rate, this is another risk to keep in mind as you build a game company.（source：psychochild）