Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which 2048 are you referring to? The creator of the one that hit it off on HN said that they weren't aware of Threes until after it took off [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373927
He says he wasn't aware of Threes, I have no reason to doubt him. If I saw a simple game and wanted to make my own version, I wouldn't do in-depth research of the original game either. He was cloning 1024 which was explicitly a clone of Threes. I was only pointing out there was a chain there.
Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
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Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#92This is something the developers are known for. Greg's earlier game, Ridiculous Fishing, not only had it's own internal Twitter app ("Byrdr") with it's own ARG mini-game - including a fake website with SQL injection vulnerabilities and a voicemail hacking sidequest.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#93Having 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…
craftsmanship is not lean.
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 majority of my life indoctrinated to believe that polish above all else is valuable: to spend hour after hour poring over iteration after iteration, to settle with nothing except perfection. This manifests in a few ways: Pixar, for example, calls it something along the lines of 'dusting under the cabinets': making sure each aspect of each scene is absolutely pristine.
And then there's sort of the 'great is the enemy of good' / 'fail fast' / etc line of thinking: get something out the door, optimize for value over time, focus on efficacy. Which has seemingly become trendier than ever -- partly because it clearly works, and because of the undeniable numbers that people rarely buy goods and services because of, say, the fonts -- but an annoying little part of me cringes when I see a new service that doesn't even bother to customize the default Bootstrap theme.
Most times, Ii's hard for me to reconcile these two seemingly distinct philosophies because they seem at so odds with each other. I'm beginning to suspect that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: that there's a time and a place for prioritizing growth and validation above everything, and that there's a time and a place for prioritizing perfection over everything.
Threes succeeded because of a relentless pursuit of quality -- and because of an addicting core concept that arose from that pursuit.
2048 succeeded because it of its price and accessibility, because it was easily hackable, and because it could spread like wildfire. (But then, it also succeeded because of Threes.)
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#94On Android, 2048 is 0.7mb. Threes is nearly 30! Surely that factors into some people's decisions.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#95Having 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…
as a fellow dev with feet traditionally in both worlds (indie and startup), i can heartily say "meh" about both the rant and its the whole "ripoff" thing. you are absolutely correct about the indie guys being different from startup guys by wanting:
1) enough money to keep doing what they love.
2) recognition for what they do.
the threes guys? in the ios app store, their app was in the top 100 grossing list for a month and are still top 300. they've ranked #1 in downloads in 28 countries. and they're still crushing it on downloads.
http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/...
the 1024 guys? their downloads suck. their ratings are a full point worse. they're only lifting to the top 100 in countries that traditionally don't monetize worth beans anyway.
http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/823499224/rank-history/...
yeah.
i choose data over ranty "you hurt my feelings" stuff every time. and, based on said hard, objective data, the threes guys are doing just fine.
*edit - i missed that last '0' on their top grossing stat. whoops.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#96Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#97On Android, 2048 is 0.7mb. Threes is nearly 30! Surely that factors into some people's decisions.
I wouldn't even think to check that. At 30mb, Threes isn't that big (Retina assets and all). I would certainly understand your point if it was 300, but that doesn't seem excessive.
I can only think of a single game I've run into on my iPhone that surprised me with it's size. I'm not sure what it was (maybe an old version of Scrabble?), but it was a word game that was hundred of megs and didn't have much in the way of graphics.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#98Also, time/effort/money spent developing a game does not make it better or worse than other games. Some dead simple things are awesome, and some things that took forever aren't. Again, I have and like Threes quite a bit, but the time it took to make doesn't make it better than anything else. I haven't played the knockoffs, but if they are doing well I suspect they are decent games in their own right.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#99I 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…
Whether or not it's the company your friend is at, King games do the same thing (the Candy Crush stuff). All of the games of theirs I've seen are tweaks of puzzler games that are 20 years old. Throw on lots of shiny graphics and transitions, tweak the edges of the gameplay, and viola! New market killer.
Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
#100People seem to get stuck on the idea that a good game is good because of it's mechanic. Therefore if someone uses your mechanic, you're stuffed. A mechanic is only part of what makes a game really good. It's a similar mistake to having a feature focus in a product company.
It has been fun to see all the riffing off the Threes concept over the past couple of weeks. And I'm sure Asher Vollmer and team will benefit from it all. There is more interest in all the games, they'll have extra ideas from the clones that come out, they find out for free some ideas that don't work. It will help them raise the bar on Threes and make it a better, more successful game.