> One challenge of the AppStore (and obviously the Android stores, and simply by definition the Web) - is that there is no real way to "reward" the original developers for their many months of hard work, when others can simply clone, tweak the artwork and mechanics (or in the case of Zynga, just the artwork) - and release and market their own duplicate of a game after someone else has done all the hard work.
There certainly are ways. But it involves building involved games that are more than the distillation of one trick. I'm confident that we'll do well with our RPG on mobile in part because Zynga will literally never copy the game I'm working on and Kemco--the biggest purveyor of RPGs on handhelds--just plain makes worse games than what we'd actually allow out the door (that whole "professional pride" thing, I'd rather release nothing than release a bad game).
I like Threes. It has a really neat core conceit and I enjoy playing it. But another word for "core conceit" is "gimmick", and most gimmicks are hard to make exclusive.
I probably should have differentiated between "Simple Games around a particular mechanic" and "Rich Environments or Game Engines."
The Simple Games around a particular mechanic can, as I've now learned, take many months to develop, and polish until they get to that nugget of experience. But, once that nugget has been published - it's tempting for others to rip off the mechanic. Tetris, Farmville, Candy Crush, PacMan, etc.. all fall into this field with threes.
There certainly are ways. But it involves building involved games that are more than the distillation of one trick. I'm confident that we'll do well with our RPG on mobile in part because Zynga will literally never copy the game I'm working on and Kemco--the biggest purveyor of RPGs on handhelds--just plain makes worse games than what we'd actually allow out the door (that whole "professional pride" thing, I'd rather release nothing than release a bad game).
I like Threes. It has a really neat core conceit and I enjoy playing it. But another word for "core conceit" is "gimmick", and most gimmicks are hard to make exclusive.