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From the very end - these guys sound REALLY bitter:

"""If you read this whole thing. Thank you. Wow. If you scrolled down here and skimmed it or just wanted to see if there was a prize at the end, well, you're here. It's about the journey, man.

Hopefully this post points to what we're getting at when we say that making these tiny games is littered with hard and painful times that are full of uncertainty and self-doubt. You never know if something is really going to work. It's not easy. But cloning or ripping off a design in a week, that's a bit different isn't it?"""



Things weren't that bad this time, but they've been seriously bitten in the past. As (one of them) got close to releasing their game Ridiculous Fishing last year, a competitor quickly cloned it and beat them to the app store and got a high ranking. They nearly canned the game because of a ripoff.

Truth is, the app store is a pretty scummy market.


How did it get cloned before it was on the app store?


I went to look it up and saw I was missing a part of the story. They first released the game as a flash mini-game called Radical Fishing. The whole strange story is here:

http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/5/3461458/cloning-case-files-...


That was a lesson on how NOT to launch idea you want to monetise — why anybody would want to pay fro something they have already for free? :)


They may not have realized how successful a concept it was until they had released the flash version.




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