Does anyone have any stats on Threes' sales? I wonder if 2048 has significantly boosted them.
I bought threes after hearing about it in the comments of a thread about 2048, I'm sure other people did too
I did the same!
Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
141–150 of 218 posts
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#142I loved threes, Played it for close to 20-30 hours during winter break. As soon as 2048 came out, I managed to get to 2048 on my second try based on my experience with threes. I play 2048 in my browser whenever I have a spare 5 minutes, and when I'm on the Bus, I still frequently hop into a quick game of Threes. The mechanics of the two games are very similar, and obviously 2048 is a direct descendent of threes - but…
> 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 ce…
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.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#143I may be alone on this, but I have difficulty distinguishing OP's argument from http://www.amazon.com/The-Quickening-Todays-Trends-Tomorrows...
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#144I loved threes, Played it for close to 20-30 hours during winter break. As soon as 2048 came out, I managed to get to 2048 on my second try based on my experience with threes. I play 2048 in my browser whenever I have a spare 5 minutes, and when I'm on the Bus, I still frequently hop into a quick game of Threes. The mechanics of the two games are very similar, and obviously 2048 is a direct descendent of threes - but…
> But, Threes does have some "issue" - one is really poor startup times. It's slow enough that I am more likely to play 2048 in my browser, than bother firing up Threes on my iPhone. The piece assignment in threes, is also somewhat less pleasing to my experience than in 2048, for whatever reason. I'll admit that still puzzles me. I'm not sure what Threes is doing but it does seem to take an inordinately long amount o…
Very good point. It had one of the slowest app startup times on my iPhone 4 which for a conceptually simple tile puzzler that you play on the train is pretty bad.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#145I tried to install Threes on Android, no ART support => I don't care anymore, playing 2048 and the clones :)
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? :)
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#147I had tried threes.. But I didn't like it.
I do like 2048
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#148On Android, 2048 is 0.7mb. Threes is nearly 30! Surely that factors into some people's decisions.
Threes is ridiculously heavyweight. It takes half a minute to load which is funny considering it's graphics. And sometimes it's muted so i have to restart it...
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#149Having 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…
> and that they were indeed the first to ship a full, polished game with that concept.
For their very specific take on it, maybe. The concept of "slam blocks into each other to combine them into something new" is many years old. I first ran into it as an example of a game written in Haxe years and years ago.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#150I have a friend who works at a successful mobile gaming company (not Zynga). He freely admits that what they do is rip off whatever games are most popular. Period. End of Story. They even have a SWAT team that will go out and build prototypes in days and launch them on the App store as quickly as possible to get some users. They've even launched games with the exact same name as the popular game in hopes of tricking…
I dont think mobile games are entirely indicative of what the gaming industry is. The rampant cloning and wild west nature is kind of a characteristic unique to mobile. Cloning and stuff still happens in other gaming mediums, but it has never seemed to be as bad as it is on mobile.
Rampant cloning and 'wild west' exactly describes home computer game development in the eighties. I don't think it's unique to mobile, or a modern phenomena.