"King copied our game" says indie dev
Matt Cox of Stolen Goose says King copied his game when publishing negotiations fell through
Matthew Cox, one member of indie studio Stolen Goose, has made allegations that publisher King.com directly copied his game, Scamperghost. On his personal website, Cox says that Stolen Goose was in talks with King vice president of mobile game Lars Jornow to bring Scamperghost to King's RoyalGames portal. During negotiations, Stolen Goose decided that an alternate online portal, MaxGames.com, made a better offer, so they parted ways with King.
Cox says King then had another developer, EpicShadow, clone Scamperghost to create Pac-Avoid. In an email to Stolen Goose about the situation, Jornow explained that King had decided to sponsor a similar game. When Cox emailed Pac-Avoid's developer, EpicShadow, he was told that the second developer was asked by King to clone the game.
"First off, sorry that we cloned your game for Lars of King.com," wrote EpicShadow's Matt Porter in an email. "Lars approached us one day explaining that you (Stolen Goose) had signed a contract, had been working with him on finishing the deal, and then got a better deal and backed out. He asked us to clone the game very quickly, and even wanted to beat the release of the original game."
According to Cox, no such contract was signed. Porter told VentureBeat that his team was paid $3,000 to clone the game and he believes that Stolen Goose "probably did something that wasn't perfectly ethical." Despite his belief, Porter says that does not validate King's decision to clone the game.
"Scamperghost isn't the most original game in the world. It's obviously inspired by Pac-Man but we at least took it in an original direction by making it a mouse avoider with no walls," said Cox in his post. "King.com, however, showed no respect for other people's intellectual property when they made a direct, blatant clone of Scamperghost. Now they've trademarked "Candy" and are using their massive legal power against other small competing developers. A bit of a double-standard, eh?"
King.com has yet to respond to our request for comment.
No key designers "a la Kojima", no voice actors like Troy Baker, No deeply developed story like Last of Us, No big open worlds like Skyrim.
Instead a lot of rip-offs and quick cash-ins sometimes with licenses from movies. And, when it's not the case (because there are some good products with talented people behind them) they are 90% time killers with little else to offer because that is what most of the phone companies want Money, money, money and maybe sell the company in two/three years. A step back that sends games directly to the 90's, when all that was there was "shoot the little enemy airship" "jump over the little platform" and "win that race with 300 cars ahead of you"
But who cares? we'll have 7 Billion smartphones in two years and we get 3 Million activations per day. developed and complex games in consoles and PC with good acting, good script and great production values? Irrelevant, right?
No offense, but just my opinion/friday rant. Have a great weekend ;)
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Alfonso Sexto on 24th January 2014 8:04am
Unless you are self funded (which I try to remain so, via providing services) developers working in this area of the industry are at the mercy of investment groups to prove that they can infact make money after convincing these investors with activations and user numbers, and that they are a good bet.
From an investors point of view, its rarely done for the love of the medium, so its not long before they start looking at the idea of cloning successful products with slight mods as the financial pressures are applied and the original content isnt hitting the numbers promised when they pitched.
I meet with business owners from a range of sectors, some start ups and some well established businesses twice a month. My advice from what I have learned from them is: before you sell out to someone, you should have a long hard think about what you want to become. In a lot of cases pressure from investors can lead to the death of your company (distortion of your products) as much as it can lead to its growth.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Sandy Lobban on 24th January 2014 10:21am
Also curious that everywhere I've seen this commented on there's no hate for EpicShadow who took money from King on a contract to clone a game. Not like they didn't know what they were doing. Obviously the narrative is better when it's a big mean company ripping off an indie, but in this case it's a big mean company offering a contract, and an indie taking the money to rip off another indie. Yay for the little guys screwing each other over for cash!
King (or MidasPlayer) were a company that had no interest in games beyond their being a means to drive traffic to their online casinos. The tech press are quick to have a revisionist view of any company that is mega-successful.
@Anthony Gowland
Actually that's exactly what they were doing. It's a similar situation to Ninja Fishing/Ridiculous Fishing. King couldn't buy the game so they tried to use their considerable distribution muscle to make their clone the de facto standard. I don't think EpicShadow are exactly blameless but ultimately it was King's decision.
It's a pity that they actually manage to get a degree of success, at least in terms of revenue, because then they overshadow better quality products.
The only bright note is that these companies don't last in the long run. Their policies are too short term and, without investing in something actually creative and innovative, their success burns fast.
One could argue that its almost a by-product of a company becoming very successful and suddenly it become absolutely necessary to protect your brand from companies that want to jump on the quick buck and create similar products to confuse consumers and take advantage (which in al fairness sometimes is the case) it happened to Zynga and their "farm" or "Ville" titles and now king seems to be the next in line.
The thing that stops me from completely defending them is the fact that Rovio, arguably the most successful of all, never got into this kind of PR nightmare, at least not that I can remember, they didn´t trademark "bird" which just thinking about it is ridiculos but King got "candy" approved so go figure. As far as I can tell people will never put Rovio and Zynga in the same sentence, but now king seems poised to become the next Zynga and I can´t help to think that there must have been a better way to handle the situation.
The problem is, we complain about these things here, on a games industry-centric site, but the reality is that we're not the target audience .We're just a vocal minority. I have friends who don't like video games, but play Candy Crush Saga all the time. They're the epitome of casual; they just looking for time-wasters. They aren't even hearing about this unless I tell them, and then at that point, they don't care. Their game is fun, that's it.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by James Robertson on 27th January 2014 10:37am
Which is not "preventing people using a word as its dictionary definition."