Is it true if you release a succesful game, Ketchapp will copy it in a week?

I was told that by a friend.

 

Go and have a look. See what succesful aps are out. See what ketchup has. Compare release dates.

At the high end run away successes like flappy bird will spawn a flood of clones as people try to cash in. But lower spectrum of successes are less frequently cloned.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3466i9/the_2048_guys_stole_my_iphone_game/

Every recently released game after that studio opened, they have a clone ready three weeks after at most.
It is also said they do not create their own games but go around looking in the app store for ideas to both cash on them and deny others.
This environment is becoming harder and harder to sail around...

It does not hurt to release a game to obscurity.
What hurts is having others clone it and become successful with it.

 

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=265361&highlight=escape
They even copy the crash impact debris animations...

Think I am going to build my reputation on PC and then just have iOS as an additional branch.
It is Game Over to start making a name in there.

 

What is the difference? Blizzard has like a billion dollars and their last 3 games have been almost direct rip-offs of other games. If companies with huge amounts of money and resources can´t produce unique games, why would indie mobile developers.

Hearthstone - Magic TCG
Heroes of the Storm - LOL
Overwatch - Team Fortress

I think it will be very soon where you have multiple teams of devs just copying anything that appears in the sales charts within weeks. Your profit window will be less than a month, and by then you better have a different game ready to go.

 

Name a Minecraft clone that is better than Minecraft.

Where are the clones of Monument Valley? Ridiculous Fishing? Hitman Go?

A successful game doesn't guarantee a clone, and being cloned doesn't necessarily mean it'll impact its sales. A simple game with transparent mechanics is asking to be ripped off, sure, but that still doesn't mean it'll happen.

Besides, if you make a game and its deemed good enough for someone else to attempt to cash in on, chances are you're doing well enough in sales that you should still be happy. And if you've done your job properly, clones will be immediately recognizable as such, and players will still prefer your experience to your rivals'.

 

None of that is the same thing. All the 'directly ripped off' games are already old.
Heroes of the Storm has a right to copy LOL considering MOBAs come from Dota Warcraft 3 mod and it was LOL and Dota 2 that struggled finding ways to make their games different to that original one of Blizzard. Plus the original concept is more than 10 years old.
Overwatch is Blizzard's friendly jab at Valve making Dota 2. That, and TF2 is already 8 years old.

Blizzard didn't copy Magic TCG 3 weeks after Magic TCG was released. TCG is a really old franchise.
Same for Lego never making a Minecraft game. Only they are to be blamed.

The issue in here is devs actively analyzing the market to copy games as they come out to the extend they have stopped making their own games even when they have already gotten the name. It allows them to both deny emerging indies plus making profit.
Which only makes them a*****.

 

@Carve_Online If Hearthstone is a direct rip off of Magic, then Skyrim is a direct rip off of Final Fantasy.

There's a huge difference between refining mechanics to a game in the same genre and adding your own twist, with all original assets, style, themes, etc... and the direct copying the OP is referring to. Any game in the App Store that has Flappy or 2048 in the title is an example of this type of behavior.

Mobile gaming monetization is peaking, and like any industry, that bring a with it the bubble of people trying to cash in on it. When it passes, those people will move on to other easy cash grabs, and things will settle down again until the next big hit draws media coverage back to all the dollars being thrown around, and round and round we go.

Show me an industry where there aren't scabs trying to rip off the hard work of others to make a buck and I'll show you a medium that hasn't matured yet.

 

Exactly. Games like Tomb Raider Go and Hitman Go can't be copied because their value is all in the massive asset and level production. And Monument Valley might have given a headache to anyone giving it a look with the intention of copying

But look at Tomb Raider Go. Is the gameplay anything special? No. 'Touch to go here'. All value is in the environment art and the IP name/value.
In terms of gameplay, it is much more simple than Angry Birds or as simple as Fruit Ninja.
Not saying it is wrong, but that at the end of the day, there's a limit on which kind of mechanics can be implemented on Mobile so using 'production values' as a metric of 'something not deserving to be ripped off' is just not right.

What I am saying is that those of us who like relying in a simply hook or 'transparent game mechanic' as you call them will eventually have no chance in the AppStore. Games like Super Hexagon or Tiny Wings, you come with a simple concept, take 3 months getting them into a nice balance and eventually release them. Someone comes and rips it off and someone says 'The concept is so simple I am not surprised'. Yeah, it might look simple, but just like Threes creator says: "That's only because you are seeing the end product!"
While I understand some do prefer high-production games like Republique, for me Mobile is about 'short entertaining games'. Games like Jetpack Joyride and Candy Crush which you can pick-up while waiting to arrive at a place.
I develop platformers (and also a really far away 3D shooter side project) for PC that due to the touch nature of iOS, wouldn't work on it.

And the problem is not so much 'They ripped off my game!' because chances are your game was not successful. The problem is they are now ripping off your game to steal your chance at success and in the way eliminating one more competitor before being even given a chance.

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=265361&highlight=escape
^Someone in that thread believes the original is the rip-off.

 

I see your point, and don't think I'm not also discouraged by this type of activity as well. I just also believe that quality will rise to the top.

The only game I've finished is an iOS version of the ancient Viking game of hnefatafl. I didn't invent that game, so in a way, I'm cloning the original. I also wasn't the first hnefatafl game on iOS, so you could argue I was copying other apps, too.

What I did do was try to bring something new to the table. None of the other games were 3D, and none that I tried offered group captures, a somewhat complicated feature of the game to program. Along with some other features like Achievements and an awesome soundtrack, I took ideas others had laid the foundation for and tried to improve upon them and add my own style to it. I have no problem with this style of iteration.

While there may be the occasional confusion like the thread you pointed to, I think in most cases that type of thing is rare. It's annoying to have the marketplace flooded, sure, but I don't believe it hurts developers directly. If it does, perhaps it indicates a flaw in your design somewhere.

Example: say I'm the developer of Minecraft, but in my freemium version, players have to pay tokens to mine blocks after their daily quota. Someone clones my game and eliminates this scheme, making it resemble actual Minecraft. Consumers prefer this version and I stop seeing a profit. It turns out my monetization scheme was an inferior mechanic that deserved to lose out to a properly designed game.

Now let's say I make regular Minecraft first, it's hugely successful, and then a million people clone it (just like real life). Am I really missing out on anything here? The game was already a success. Jinx isn't going to be making CastleCraft licensed shirts just because they cloned me.

Maybe I'm just not aware enough of real damage done by these cloners, but to me they just seem to be more of an annoyance than anything. If you have a solid game idea and believe in your ability to execute it, I wouldn't let something as trivial as lesser people riding your coat tails deter you from it.

 

If you make a game that can be cloned in 2 weeks, then you can't complain if people will clone it.
Do something that will take 6 months at least and see that only if you made loads of cash already people will copy it.

Compare the number of flappy birds clones with the number of Clash of Clans clone and the latter is by far far more economically successful.

 

I am consistently disappointed that no one has yet tried to cash in by cloning Pond Wars.

 

Never heard of it.

 

Its all good. @Gigiwoo already tricked me into writing a post mortem and realizing I'd been flogging a dead horse with that game. So now I am working on a secret project that will take the world by storm! You will see clones everywhere! Or it might already be a thing that exists. I should really do some market research.

 

And for heaven´s sake, don´t announce your game until you need to. Nothing better than having someone announce a cool idea, then say they just started working on it...

 

Pond Wars 4D is the world's worst kept secret.

 

What are you implying?
Any game developed by one or a few devs in the span of a year can be copied by an 18-person studio in only a few weeks no matter how complex is the game.

Game design is synonym to iteration.
If we take a year to make a game it isn't 'a year making content'.
It is a month making content and a year fine-tuning it.
Amount of content comes out all by itself after the gameplay is finished.

As a funny example, Flappy Bird was made in 3 days.
It takes 15 minutes to copy. One hour to get done with the art (or zero if you use primitives)
And now you are saying 'you can't complain if your game can be recreated in 2 weeks'.
...

It becomes much worse when you consider they can steal the concept and with their number of employees, remaking it with much better art.
And the issue in here isn't 'stealing my game concept/idea'. It is that publishers like 'Ketchapp' have a big name, and so they can go around scanning for new releases and say 'This game would be a hit if it got some exposition' without the game even getting a chance to slowly build a playerbase.
You can't say Ketchapp releases get that big amount of downloads because of their originality and because they have never been done before.
And it will get worse when more studios start getting opened with that same focus:
"Most iOS games are good. The difference is in awareness.
Instead of adding more original games to the content pool, let's simply take recent releases, iterate and improve on them and kill two birds in one shot."
Because there's a difference in copying a game one year after release and three weeks after release.

 

More developers does not magically mean the game will be developed faster.

 

You obviously don't have much experience in development if you say so. There is a limit at how much you can parallelize work, otherwise companies would just outsource to 100 devs and gets done in few days...
It's called law of diminishing returns and mean that after a certain number the advantage you get by increasing the number is always less. Example(purely random numbers) 5 people will get it done in 6 months, 10 people in 4 months 20 people in 3 months, 30 people in 2 months and 29 days.

First I didn't say anything coded in 2 weeks, but "that it can be cloned in 2 weeks". It may have took 3-4 months or even 1 year to you, but if it can be cloned easily it mean the end game is easy to develop and the easier it is to develop the more people will jump on the idea of cloning it.
All ketchup games fit into this criteria and since gameplay cannot be patented(thanks god) there is nothing you can do.
If you make something simple you are prone to be cloned, but anyway if you made something simple chance is 99% your idea wasn't that original.
Not convinced? Take Crossy Road, they used frogger mechanics and repackaged it for a modern medium. Should they be not allowed to do so?
But more importantly,were they allowed to complain if somebody else made it big in their place after seeing their app?
I don't think so.
This is the situation of the current app market, if you enter it you should know what to expect.
Of course devs who already got a following got it easy, so instead of doing anything of the level of complexity of Ketchapp games as your next game do something more complex or don't take this advice and take your ticket to the lottery if you wish.

I'm working on my game for 1 year now and I can guarantee that once finished unless they take the code and repackage it with different assets(which anyway will be hard to handle a lot of code is server side), the least it will take to copy is 6 months. If in this 6 months I fail to create a following and somebody else decide it's an idea worth pursuing, it mean I failed at marketing and I will have to accept it.

Regarding Flappy bird, it fall exactly on the description of "take your ticket to the lottery".

 

I don't know about ketchap, but I'd keep an eye on Mustard...

 

So what I am understanding is this only applies to platformer type games. People spend weeks to years trying to create an amazing platformer game that is pushed onto 1000s of platformer games released every day on app store with a small chance of actually getting the attention it deserves. IF you get the attention the game deserves and magically becomes a success Ketchapp will copy your game and release it in a few weeks. Chances feel very very slim on these type of games, I have no clue why majority of people make only platformer type games. Just make a RPG for a few years would give you better chances of being successful?

 

I think you meant puzzle games instead of platformers.

 

Yes it can be done assuming you hand the outsourcing team the game you want to copy and explicitly tell them 'swap every asset in every level for ones with a similar function.'
You hear the problem in here?
You are shamelessly telling them 'pick-up that game as the base'.
You are RE-SKINNING a game, NOT making one.
Two different things!
And as long as it is a 2D game making use of sprites, the programming will never be too complex.
Not in the days when you are giving an out of the box functional 2D physics engine.

The modern iOS environment is one where
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Giana_Sisters#Alleged_lawsuit
is allowed.

You say I lack the experience of development, but isn't that exactly what the Threes developer is complaining about?
Seemingly Simple games with a nice hook being copied in a matter of weeks and the new game being inferior because they didn't even bother understanding its appeal or core underlying mechanics (1024 and 2048 are inferior to Threes) and yet get the spotlight. You say 'Simple' because you look at them and say "Oh, I could make that in 15 minutes".
I'd say you are the one lacking game design experience if your views about development are that superficial.
You remind me of those idiots at Halfbrick(Makers of Jetpack Joyride) who just kicked all of their game designers.
Slowly becoming an industry of people who think 'Anyone can design ' . smh
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...ame_designers_refocuses_design_into_teams.php

Yes, Crossy Road is a Frogger clone and Candy Crush is Bejelewed which is Panel de Pon.
And Angry Birds is that old game I can't remember and Minecraft is that old game I can't remember.
But you are disregarding one crucial factor: the 'clones' in this case came many years after, and their developer's intent wasn't 'I want to copy that just released game' but 'I loved that old game and I will make a new one with my own twist'. Ketchapp (and others) are just all day, sitting in there in the App Store, waiting for preys with potential to be released and copy them.

And nice work disregarding the Flappy Bird example as 'someone won the lottery' when my point was about how it
took its developer 3 days even when it can be cloned in 15 minutes.

And yes, I am grateful gameplay can't be patented.
What I am not grateful is that games you can tell are shamelessly ripping off others that have come less than a month ago are allowed into the AppStore.

ONE BIG EDIT:
As long as animations are not involved, content creation will be a breeze.
Which is the case for most puzzle games.
Hence what makes them easier to clone.

 

Again you don't know what you are talking about. Re-Skinning imply that you have the source code, or that you are using the original binaries and in both cases if not authorized it's not a matter of ethics anymore but even law. You are breaking the law, and it can be persecuted. This is not the case you made before, because Ketchapp is obviously not re skinning but copying the gameplay, which is totally another thing. Re-skiining without authorization is usually only done by Chinese devs because it is very hard to enforce there,so they exploit the situation.

You make it sound everything so simple. Look, we have Unity that do even coffe, successful game for sure.
Maybe it's not just 1+1? Maybe even making good art that blend together well is hard? Making captivating sound track?
Guess why we don't see many super mario clones reaching its popularity?

Look, you need to take a stance. One second you say anyone can do it just by having more devs, then you say it is very easy because of 2D physics handling everything, then you say flappy birds can be done in 15' and then you tell ME i'm the one thinking everything is so easy? Are you listening yourself?
I said a game like most ketchapp( I don't know them well, not my cup of tea) do can be cloned in 2 weeks(up to 2 weeks, if it make you happy), which is true because it's even backed by fact yourself are providing when you say they monitor the market and immediately come out with their own version.
So who is saying designing a game is easy, me or you?

I didn't disregard it, I seriously don't understand your point. I said game like that can be cloned in 2 weeks( up to 2 weeks,ok?) and you said it can be cloned in 15' so you said the same thing.
When I said won the lottery, I was talking about the easiness of copying it. You make a game that simple?
It can be copied in no time, so your chance of being successful are very slim because anybody can copy it and become successful in your place.
By the way I would like to see you do it in 15' from zero( no reskinning) and no prototype but final product, good luck.
Again show you are way underestimating the easiness of development. Or are you gonna use a 18 devs studio to clone a game like flappy birds in 15'?

I don't like it either, but the world doesn't run on our taste. Life isn't fair. You either adapt or succumb.
The situation is this and if you don't like it nobody is forcing you to do it.

 

Funny how you say I am not talking about when your definition of 're-skinning' is as narrow minded as 'You need the source code to re-skin something'

'Making good art blend together' is a valuable skill, but nothing a professional isn't lacking.
Same for music making and sound mixing.

Conflating game design with game development.
I am not the one who should take a stance.
You should simply start learning about the industry.

I took less than 15 without the UI.
The exact same game.
It is just an upwards force applied to a rigidbody and a pipe spawner. What exactly is complex about that?
That's only me talking about a game I didn't t come up with of course.

I agree.
Doesn't mean I can't point it out and see if we could slowly come up with a a solution if there's one.

 

Here, let me put it in bold, so maybe you'll stop reading half sentence:

If you know any other way, please enlighten me. And decompiling the code mean you are still relying on the original binaries and it's breaking the law and I doubt it's what ketchapp do.
http://www.heroescharge-arena.com/2015/03/25/blizzard-vs-lilith-games-vs-ucool/

Again oversimplifying. Nice, a game without UI, who wouldn't want a game without UI. So polished.
Let's remove practically everything, because the game is already so complex.
I guess in 15' you also did your artwork, right?
Or you downloaded it from the internet?
What about advertising? You need to integrate also ads, you wrote all the code to handle the ads in these 15'?
Gamecenter leaderboard? The original had that too.
What about sounds?
Anyway I thought it had at least some different levels, didn't remember well.

 

I'll probably get in trouble from the sensei for even revealing this much before I release. But the game is in a completely different franchise and genre. Pond Wars really is done.

 

Oh, and to solve the flappy clone in 15 minute debate.

Its ugly as anything. But technically it is flappy birds.

 

Well no, but no.
It's too little even for a prototype and you just proved 15' is too little.
There is no sound, no UI, no score saving, no animation, nothing.
And you didn't even use pooling, which in a game very time sensitive like that you don't want the GC to kick in when you are near a pipe causing a glitch in the animation that will make you crash.
I would like to say the devils is in the details, but these are not even details that are missing you didn't even scratch the surface.

It's like saying, look I made super mario 3d just because i put some cube on a plane with a collider and add a standard character controller to a cilinder that can jump over the cubes, woaaah. Let's be serious...

 

I didn't actually assert that a saleable flappy bird clone could be made in 15. Just showed what a competent dev could do in 15. You are right, it would take a couple of days to make this game saleable.

But if the core can be built in 15 minutes, expect a lot of clones.

Actually, who am I kidding. Its just shameless self promotion of my video. If you watched it I just made another 0.001 cents. Thanks everybody.

 

tbh it shouldnt matter. They will only know about your game because it is already successful.

 

Yeah, this thread really is the equivalent of worrying: "If I win the lottery, do I have to pay extra taxes on my regular income?"

 

It might seen like that but it is just I got the impression after Flappy Bird, an organized industry with a focus on finding and copying trends before they go full eruption was born. At least before it people used to be more subtle, but now it seems like we have embraced the 'No new original idea under the Sun so why bother trying to make our own thing if someone else already made it before' and distorted it even harder into 'Every game is a re-skin, so why bother trying to rethink the mechanics.'.

But at least I learned from this thread that you can have some influence into the success of 'your simple game concepts' by releasing initially more complex and harder to copy games with a big focus on asset amount and art itself and 'closer to a console experience' than smartphone typical tap/swipe mechanics.

Who would have thought: I thought we begin by making simple games and slowly grow up into making more complex ones, when in the current ecosystem, there are actually higher chances of your 'complex game'(closely associated with the word 'niche') gaining you the necessary userbase to back the release of your future 'simple game' concept.

So I wouldn't say the thread was a total waste

 

If you can't beat em, join em.

If you think you've got what it takes to predict game success and produce a flood of clones then do it.

It might end up being harder then you think.

 

I think a lot of this is tied to your definition of success, too. I'm super proud of myself for just finishing a game and releasing it (I'll be even more proud once my patch is accepted that makes things work how they're supposed to...). The game is not monetized at all, and I currently have 112 "purchases" (not sure if they're all installs). I have one review giving the game five stars.

To me, this is a success. If someone had those kind of numbers while trying to make money off in-game ads, they'd be sorely disappointed. The concept of the game is simple, the logic of the game rules is out there and researchable, so it'd be easy for someone else to implement as well, and if they had a small team, they could probably also easily add all the features I had planned, plus monetize it properly.

All that being said, I'm not concerned at all about someone copying the idea (in no small part because my idea is not wholly original itself) and making more money or getting more attention for the idea. Partly because the game is indeed niche, sure, but also because I've already achieved what I set out to do, and I'm not competing with the type of developers who clone.

I think it's also worth pointing out that Flappy Bird wasn't copied because of its great gameplay or original ideas. It is itself a copy of many games like it that came before it (that old Helicopter in the cave Flash game comes to mind), and became copied solely because of its meteoric popularity increase and media attention it garnered. So if you make a game that gets a ton of attention and makes you lots of money... yes, I'd expect your game will be cloned very quickly. However, if your game is good and makes you enough money that you can just continue making games and maybe eat once in a while, I don't believe you're any more likely to get cloned than Viking Chess.

 

If you have what you think is a good app, something that will be popular - there's nothing stopping you trademarking the game name. Had .GEAR trademarked 'Flappy Bird' sooner, 95% of the clones would have been pulled down.

It's the only way to prevent that kind of cloning/copying. Once you have trademarked the game, theres nothing stopping you sending the App Store a cease and desist order and if you can prove Trademark/copyright, then I see no reason why the like of Apple and Google won't police it. Just because we're indie devs, doesnt mean we need an indie mindset if we have a successful game.

There's a blog about it on Gamasutra

 

Uh, Trademarking a name for each app is not practical except for a big business. Even if you file yourself you won't have access to the easy look up databases the lawyers have. This is another case of making John Sutter types extremely rich on your speculation for an early retirement and fame.

For information here is a listing of Apple trademark registrations by a cheap online service:

http://www.trademarkia.com/trademarks-search.aspx?tn=Apple

Don't be mislead by the 'cheap' $69 fee with is actually not cheap given the failure rate, you must also pay the government filing fees which is at a minimum $225.

Well that's not very a productive use of your money as it's pure speculation until you have a financially successful product and business. The type of success that lets you buy a house, car, or medical care with cash upfront, not the type of success that you published a fun app that sold nothing, although that's fun and rewarding in itself.

And if you imagine you can 'name squat' and make millions from a special name, take a look again at all the entities that registered or tried to register the word Apple. And for all the fame Apple Computer has now, when I was a boy, the only fame the word Apple had was William Tell, Johnny Appleseed, Apple Jacks (a case of a big business registering the name of a specific product and a registration that didn't stop copycat cereals), Apple Records, (solely because of the Beetles so the word Apple was of little consequence when one chose to buy Beetle recordings), and actual apples that you eat.

So, it's better to settle to actually make and finish at game you think is worthy of such expense and withhold it from release until you properly register it as needed if you feel your product is that good. Even if you don't register beforehand you can still register fast enough if your app is successful to help remove copies from the stores and do that well before the copiers can get their copy of your app to the market if you are aware that in the 1st month of sufficient sales you need to register as they sensibly won't bother copying your app until you are successful.

So forget the marketing world long enough to create an app that you like and if your creativity in creating the game is applied to naming your game and business you'll find the name you give your business or app is of little consequence unless you choose socially insulting words - and in a market saturated in socially insulting as a crass marketing ploy, well you are showing up with a handful of chaff at a place stocked with silos of wheat.

 

@12:30.

If not even Marvel can, then no one really can

 

Trade mark is all about name and brand protection. You can prevent someone pretending to be you, or pretending their product is related to your product. But that's got nothing to do with preventing someone cloning a game under a different name and different logos.

Generic terms like flappy and bird would be hard to register as trade marks anyway.

 

Oh Marvel is safe, even had the game been designed and created in the US that game in no way competes with Marvel characters. It complements them if it is effective satire though.

I used to watch a show called Casualty but stopped because in 2 years all the star characters had been 'killed' and these were the doctors, nurses, and paramedics for crying out loud. Imagine the surprise of patients from those two years on Casualty that returned to Holby City only to discover the doctors, nurses, paramedics were all dead. That's the type of unrealistic writing that is ripe for parody.

These game makers are based in China and they make no attempt to hide that the game is a satire of Marvel Comics. It's legal way for recognition in making entertainment but usually ineffective unless the satire is funny and relevant. Yes, if American business tried this they'd probably be endlessly harassed by lawyers from Disney but really satire is perfectly legal in America still today, even by non-famous people.

So it's a smart try by the Chinese company that made this game but you can tell it was expensive to make. They will lose a big lot of money if the game fails but not near as much as a western business. I do like the art work of the characters.

The thing about using other's IP is that like a soap opera (are their any US soap operas left?) fans want to see their favorite soap opera, not another soap opera, and likewise so do Marvel Comics readers want to read about their favorite characters and not other characters, like D.C. Comics although anyone that had read comics from DC and Marvel could clearly see they were copying from each other in many cases, e.g. Plastic Man and Mister Fantastic. I don't think DC lost Mister Plastic fans to Marvel and Mister Fantastic or vice versa.

So invent good original characters, original variations of good characters (Plastic Man and Mister Fantastic are examples) or learn to do effective, funny satires of well known characters if you are going to represent them as visually similar characters.

 

Sorry to reach so far back in the thread, but:

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/4/24/4257958/cloned-at-birth-the-story-of-ridiculous-fishing
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...The_story_of_Vlambeers_Ridiculous_Fishing.php

EDIT: On a side note, this thread is making me wonder why sweat shop app studios aren't a thing.

You open up a shop in your choice country (India, China, Korea, Vietnam are all good choices), then you have them go to work cloning everything you can think of, and the flood of games from one content studio will guarantee success since the games' successes are compound with one another.

Lastly, just get a hand full of people to do full time localizations and you're set.

You're a piece of human garbage for exploiting cheap labor, screwing over other legitimate devs, and hold back the medium as a whole. But you're rich.

 

Trademarks are fun, not because they are difficult to get or because they have lots of rules and regs but because they are incredibly difficult to enforce. For starters if you're making a video game using the trademark Scotch Tape and there is another company using it to sell clear adhesive tape you can both hold the trademark. You can trademark a logo but a logo isn't necessarily a trademark. It would only be enforceable if you were both working in the same category and its intentionally misleading. Misleading is definitely the key word here.

When that happens you are expected to try to resolve the matter informally (I once sent out 500 emails and then needed to deal with 300 angry responses, then pursue 200 who just didn't care, and that was just from the results of an internet search, there were undoubtedly many more under the radar. It didn't stop the problem it just deterred some of our more legitimate competitors).

From here if you agree to disagree then you will need to start legal proceedings which is fine if you have a staff legal team. Often the best strategy in these matters is to begin a siege where the more powerful of the two companies just creates a legal deadlock and waits for the other to die of starvation before moving forward.

As a smaller producer its important to put up barriers like trademarks, patents and copyright notices but as any record company can tell you, enforcing them is probably not worth your time or money, these days its better to create a place for your fanbase to congregate and in so doing legitimize your claim to a given identity over another that way. More time designing, less time protecting (bottomless money pit!). Build it and they will come??

Disney I find allow something or don't, if you're boosting their brand and not harming their revenue generation they turn a blind eye. If they're not happy with you then suddenly you have no friends and legal challenge is moot because you have nowhere to sell your product.

 

I heard they copy games even rubbish ones..

 

Can't they get sued if they copy someone's app and make money from it?

 

If they download your ap and reupload it as there own yes. But if they clone the ap, by building something similar of there own then no.

 

That's not how trademark works

"Flappy Bird" would be trademarked as video game software, noting its specific features, designs, characters, etc. That means no other piece of video game software can infringe on that without permission. It doesn't mean you can't ever use "flappy" or "bird" in your product.

 

Hmm would have thought there would be a copyright issue if they obviously copy someone's game with a similar name, mechanics, characters etc.

 

Names can come under trademark laws if the game is trying to pass itself off as your game. Characters have copyright protection, no one can copy your character directly. But it doesn't take much work to make a character distinct. Technically mechanics would be covered by patent law. But you will find almost all mechanics will be unpatentable.

 

Don't be worried about it. Simply wait for Ketchapp to choose their next game and as soon as they make an announcement of it "coming soon" get started on your own version. Yeah I get that Ketchapp is in a better position (the rich get richer advantage) but still just because they are choosing certain other games to clone doesn't mean you cannot choose certain games of theirs to clone (and improve on) in the same way.

 

I have too many of my own concepts to worry about what some Ketchapp (puppy mill) is creating.
If they happen to one day clone one of our games - I guess then we can say we have made it, we are successful. They wouldn't be cloning it if there wasn't possibility to generate revenue right?