The clone conversation is getting pretty heated of late, so we thought we’d bring you a more chill take on cloning from a developer that has had its game ripped off more times than we care to count. Specifically, we wanted to point out what Mojang business head honcho Daniel Kaplan had to say about the swarm of Minecraft clones out there.
“As long as [cloners] don’t use anything we MADE, we don’t care," Kaplan told Eurogamer in a chat the other afternoon when asked about possibly suing a cloner. “Like, would the Doom creators sue everybody who has done an FPS? Don’t think so," he said, hopefully with a hrumph.
Minecraft gets ripped off in a pretty wild variety of ways. Some titles just take the look. Others just nab the specific crafting and building mechanics. Of course, there are other games out there that steal whole hog, while carefully adding the slightest touches in their code to differentiate the look.
That said, there’s a fine line between iteration and cloning. The Doom-to-FPS example Kaplan threw out there isn’t a good one; a lot of games built on what Doom did, sure, but most of those games brought something new to the genre.
“I’m really bored by the clones," Kaplan said in the chat. “They don’t bring anything new to the table, which is really sad."
Zynga and Glu Mobile recently released a total of three Tiny Tower [Free] clones between each other in the last couple of weeks. Tiny Tower creators, NimbleBit, and the game’s fans, are rightfully still outraged by these games. In the iOS universe, the last big pseudo-clone we saw was a poor attempt to capitalize on Temple Run‘s [Free] success. That title was removed from the App Store by Apple.
[via Eurogamer]
