The worst part about this is that neither the 1024 or 2048 developers do so much as acknowledge Threes as the original inspiration. It's really pathetic. Just some losers pretending to be something they're not. Common shithead piracy.
You've let your vitriol get in the way of fact-checking. Found at the bottom of http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/ : "Created by Gabriele" rel="nofollow">http://gabrielecirulli.com/>Gabriele Cirulli. Based on 1024" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1024!/id823499224>1024 by Veewo Studio and conceptually similar to Threes" rel="nofollow">http://asherv.com/threes/>Threes by Asher Vollmer. " [Please ign…
Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
131–140 of 218 posts
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#132Having a foot in the indie game developer community and another in startups, it's fascinating to see the HN comments in response to this post. The indie game developers care about originality, passion, the sweat and hard months of work, the dedication to the craft. I think the point of Asher's essay is to show how much love and effort went into it, and that they were indeed the first to ship a full, polished game wit…
They shipped the first version. They then decide to ise the term "rip offs" - even though people developing one of the first very popular rip offs claim to have never seen Threes!
Currently my most downvoted post, even though it is factually accurate and contains no opinion.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
craftsmanship is not lean.
Man, I really like this comment. And I realize that sentence alone is pretty pointless, so I'll expand on it a little: One of the huge sources of cognitive dissonance I have in HN and startups in general (and this is coming from someone who is explicitly not a startup/SV person, though I find it a great spectator sport and a wonderful font of knowledge) is the clash of lean against polish. I felt like I've spent the…
I think "quality" is the key word here, that ineffable property of refinement and aesthetic care that creates beauty in our experience of something. We'd like to live in a world of quality things, but that isn't always where market forces take us, at least in the short term. The most cynical or economically motivated might even discount the importance of quality, but I think most people just want the market to be more aligned with it in the long term to enable more of what's around us to be a work of art.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#134What the wha?
Give me a break, this same diatribe could be spouted by anybody who has built anything of significance. Yes, if you build something great, people will copy it, just as your precious snowflake was inspired by others as well. This isn't anything unique to gaming, it isn't anything unique to 3s, it is an immovable fact of life.
Are people copying the product we've poured the last 18 months into? Damn right they are, and if we don't do a better job of executing then we will rightfully get buried.
The gaming industry in general is incredibly derivative, it is the modus operandi. I ran a gaming studio for a while and you bet we did our share of "being inspired" as well as our share of "inspiring others". It is just a fact of life.
I think the thing that gets my goat here is the waxing on that 2048 is a worse game because it is easier and all the people who played that just don't "get" the careful 14 months of planning that went into 3s.
Let's get something straight here, 3s is a great mobile game, but it is just that, a mobile game for playing at bus stops. And the one and only measure of success there is how much fun people have playing it.
Flappy Bird is stupid, but it is also entertaining for no real reason. Chess on the other hand, is rather smart, and also entertaining. Both have their place. And yes, we can cry about how society is going down the drain and only appreciates dumbed down games, but 3s is pretty simple so let's not throw stones shall we?
Phew, ok, who needs a coffee?
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#135How original can a game be? The first thing I thought back when I first heard of threes was that it looks and plays like a radically streamlined-for-mobile-adult-market version of Triple Town. While partly understand the proud and grief those devs have, I consider those guys comparably well off, at least almost everyone is giving them credit and 1024 et al. are still nowhere in blatant rip-off territory as for example the myriad of Flappy Bird clones.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#136The problem (for the developers) with Threes is that it cost $1.99 to buy. If they made the app free and monetized with ads/iaps (ie, how all major apps monetize), they would have a much more successful app.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#137That was a lot more article than I expected from the title. Wow.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#138> We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it. I played Threes, and I liked it. And I feel for these guys having to watch everybody and his brother pile on to the idea they had to work so hard to tease out into reality. But here is some hard truth: none of that matters. Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. All they care about is what you have produced at the end of all th…
>So if you put your heart and soul into something, and then someone comes along, tweaks your thing and makes it better, the way to respond isn't to ask people to respect how hard you worked; it's to look closely at the new thing, understand why people like it better, and then bring that understanding to your next iteration or your next product.
It doesn't have be better or even different for a clone to be successful.
Someone copies it exactly and starts making money off it. Or more likely, 100 different people. What's your response to that supposed to be then?
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've let your vitriol get in the way of fact-checking. Found at the bottom of http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/ : "Created by Gabriele" rel="nofollow">http://gabrielecirulli.com/>Gabriele Cirulli. Based on 1024" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1024!/id823499224>1024 by Veewo Studio and conceptually similar to Threes" rel="nofollow">http://asherv.com/threes/>Threes by Asher Vollmer. " [Please ign…
https://web.archive.org/web/20140310210707/http://gabrieleci...
That's cool. Four days later, there's a shout-out to Threes:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140314133031/http://gabrieleci...
It looks like the guy credited Threes within four days of his game's release, and has yet to remove that credit. It's entirely possible that he was only aware of 1024 at the time that he made is game.
Please get angry about something that matters. We need people to not waste their anger on unimportant things. :)
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#140They are in a tight spot.
This is one of the most simple, elegant and original game ideas of recent times. One of those that make you wonder how has no one managed to stumble on it before. It is inevitable it got copied.
The reason why it got copied and why 1024/2048 got really popular is that they have overdone the original. The interface is just too funky, there's fluff, fluff and decoration. Rubbery UI makes you feel like you are fighting with the app every time you use it. There are also those smileys on tiles too. So what you have is an idea that looks more complicated than needed (with 1s and 2s being special) and the execution that looks cluttered. That's just asking for a simpler clone - exactly what they got in 1024 and 2048.
Now they have an unenviable task of trying to convince players that added complexity in their version is by design. That or try and slim down the game for faster pace (and perhaps add "basic" mode that mimics clones' simpler mechanics).