#oneaday Day 737: Attack of the Clones

So it seems that Zynga, lords of the social gaming space, are cloning Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower. This isn’t the first time Zynga has ripped off someone else’s game and removed all trace of personality from its visuals, and it certainly won’t be the last. The different this time is that people are actually taking notice, because Tiny Tower, for all its faults — and it has many, that not even its glorious retro pixel art aesthetic can counter — was extremely popular, made Nimblebit a fair amount of money and was even chosen by Apple as its iPhone game of the year.

Zynga’s new game is called Dream Heights and one of the guys from Nimblebit conveniently compared it to his game here. As you can see, it has pretty much all the gameplay of Tiny Tower with none of the visual appeal.

Now, in the mainstream games market, this sort of thing is generally frowned upon quite a bit. For all of the complaining that the big shooter franchises all look very similar, they at least try to differentiate themselves with how they play, the modes they offer and the like. Battlefield 3 offers a very different experience to Call of Duty. I don’t care for either of them, but I can appreciate that each appeals to a different subsection of the audience,

In mobile and social gaming, however, developers and publishers seem to have no such scruples. In my current position writing game reviews for Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, I regularly see games that are almost identical to each other. Most of them follow the FarmVille model to one degree or another — you click on things, there’s a countdown timer before you can click on them again to get a reward, there’s a list of insultingly simple “quests” on the left side of the screen, you get experience points every time you exhale and, generally speaking, the game is designed to be a series of not very well disguised Skinner boxes.

Other popular genres include the growing hidden object genre, where you’re sent into a cluttered room/street/train carriage and tasked with locating lists of completely arbitrary items, with scenes tied together by an often flimsy excuse for a plot. Just in the last couple of weeks, Zynga released Hidden Chronicles on Facebook, only to be followed this week by the almost identical World Mysteries from Brazilian developer Vostu. See, it’s not just Zynga doing it — it goes both ways, too.

Fans of Spry Fox’s fun puzzle game Triple Town on Facebook and Google+ may also want to check out Yeti Town on iOS by the obnoxiously-named 6waves Lolapps. This game has drawn criticism for ripping off Triple Town completely and releasing on iOS before Spry Fox were ready to release their own iOS version of their game. You may argue that Spry Fox should have been quicker off the mark in getting their iOS version to market, but it’s hard to believe that 6waves Lolapps came up with an identical concept (not almost-identical, identical) completely independently of Triple Town.

Independent developer Vlambeer ran into this issue last year when, like Spry Fox, they were beaten to the punch on an iOS game. Gamenauts’ Ninja Fishing hit the App Store shortly before Vlambeer was ready to release its own title Ridiculous Fishing, itself a reimagining-cum-sequel of its earlier Web-based title Radical Fishing. I’m very pleased to see that Vlambeer will be speaking publicly about this debacle at GDC this year.

Where does it end, though? Games are a creative art form and for all these clones to hit the market is to do the medium a disservice. You don’t get books hitting store shelves where an author has simply done a Find and Replace on all the characters’ names from someone else’s work, nor do you get movies which are simply shot-by-shot reconstructions of another movie. We get remakes, sure, but at least those are usually reimagined for a contemporary audience — and they’re being honest about their source material rather than attempting to pass themselves off as a completely new product.

This practice needs to stop. Unfortunately, cloning, it seems, is already an established part of mobile and social game development. In the long term it will only hurt everyone’s business.

So devs? Be bold. Come up with an original idea. Don’t call your game “innovative” if it’s the same as something someone released last week, and the week before, and the week before. Try something new. Break out of established conventions. The most memorable games in the mainstream are the ones which tried something new. The moment we see a successful social game break out of the market’s conventions is the same moment we’ll see people willing to be a bit less cynical and a bit more enthusiastic to see what this burgeoning industry has to offer.