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.
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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 aroundâŚ
It does not hurt to release a game to obscurity.
What hurts is having others clone it and become successful with it.
They even copy the crash impact debris animationsâŚ
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.
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Name a Minecraft clone that is better than Minecraft.
Where are the clones of Monument Valley? Ridiculous Fishing? Hitman Go?
A successful game doesnât guarantee a clone, and being cloned doesnât necessarily mean itâll impact its sales. A simple game with transparent mechanics is asking to be ripped off, sure, but that still doesnât mean itâll happen.
Besides, if you make a game and its deemed good enough for someone else to attempt to cash in on, chances are youâre doing well enough in sales that you should still be happy. And if youâve done your job properly, clones will be immediately recognizable as such, and players will still prefer your experience to your rivalsâ.
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None of that is the same thing. All the âdirectly ripped offâ 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 Blizzardâs friendly jab at Valve making Dota 2. That, and TF2 is already 8 years old.
Blizzard didnât 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*****.
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@BornGodsGame If Hearthstone is a direct rip off of Magic, then Skyrim is a direct rip off of Final Fantasy.
Thereâs 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 arenât scabs trying to rip off the hard work of others to make a buck and Iâll show you a medium that hasnât matured yet.
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Exactly. Games like Tomb Raider Go and Hitman Go canât 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. âTouch to go hereâ. 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, thereâs a limit on which kind of mechanics can be implemented on Mobile so using âproduction valuesâ as a metric of âsomething not deserving to be ripped offâ is just not right.
What I am saying is that those of us who like relying in a simply hook or âtransparent game mechanicâ 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 âThe concept is so simple I am not surprisedâ. Yeah, it might look simple, but just like Threes creator says: âThatâs only because you are seeing the end product!â
While I understand some do prefer high-production games like Republique, for me Mobile is about âshort entertaining gamesâ. 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, wouldnât work on it.
And the problem is not so much âThey ripped off my game!â 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.
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I see your point, and donât think Iâm not also discouraged by this type of activity as well. I just also believe that quality will rise to the top.
The only game Iâve finished is an iOS version of the ancient Viking game of hnefatafl. I didnât invent that game, so in a way, Iâm cloning the original. I also wasnât 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. Itâs annoying to have the marketplace flooded, sure, but I donât believe it hurts developers directly. If it does, perhaps it indicates a flaw in your design somewhere.
Example: say Iâm 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 letâs say I make regular Minecraft first, itâs 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 isnât going to be making CastleCraft licensed shirts just because they cloned me.
Maybe Iâm 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 wouldnât let something as trivial as lesser people riding your coat tails deter you from it.
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If you make a game that can be cloned in 2 weeks, then you canât 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.
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I am consistently disappointed that no one has yet tried to cash in by cloning Pond Wars. 
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Never heard of it.
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Its all good. @Gigiwoo already tricked me into writing a post mortem and realizing Iâd 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.
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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 itâŚ
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Pond Wars 4D is the worldâs worst kept secret. 
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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 isnât âa year making contentâ.
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 âyou canât complain if your game can be recreated in 2 weeksâ.
âŚ
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 isnât âstealing my game concept/ideaâ. It is that publishers like âKetchappâ have a big name, and so they can go around scanning for new releases and say âThis game would be a hit if it got some expositionâ without the game even getting a chance to slowly build a playerbase.
You canât 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:
âMost iOS games are good. The difference is in awareness.
Instead of adding more original games to the content pool, letâs simply take recent releases, iterate and improve on them and kill two birds in one shot.â
Because thereâs a difference in copying a game one year after release and three weeks after release.
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More developers does not magically mean the game will be developed faster.
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You obviously donât 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 daysâŚ
Itâs 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 didnât say anything coded in 2 weeks, but âthat it can be cloned in 2 weeksâ. 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 wasnât 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 donât 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 donât take this advice and take your ticket to the lottery if you wish.
Iâm 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 itâs 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 âtake your ticket to the lotteryâ.
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I donât know about ketchap, but Iâd keep an eye on MustardâŚ
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