We win when game developers build off each other's ideas, even making an improved version of what came before, but direct clones serve only to reduce the reward for innovators, so I strongly disagree that it's a win for the market place. Look at casual games for an example of a market that basically crashed when developers started spending all their energy cloning successful titles instead of trying to create something fresh.
As a personal example, search for Robokill in this game's release forum post:
I'm not bitter - Robokill did well and I'd be surprised if they made even 5% as much as I did - but it's hard to argue that the market place is better off because this game exists. Robokill itself is not in any way original - it's basically a mixture of Smash TV and Diablo - but I think it was a fresh enough take on existing genres to earn its place in the market.
As long as this Minecraft inspired title tries to be different in some way, though, I have no problem with it.
To be fair, though, Infiniminer has extremely little in common with Minecraft. There are some superficial similarities [0] but it is a completely different (combat based) game.
I still think that clones are perfectly alright, even good, for everyone.
[0] The world is made of destroyable blocks and has low-res, non-aliased textures. That’s about it.
You could argue that Minecraft created a new game genre, and that this game is simply part of that genre. Obviously I think they should've tried a little harder to create something unique (or at least more visually unique), but whatever. I think we will see a lot more of these survival/world building games.
Looks really nice. Sorry, but I'd rather play that than the original Minecraft.
I find it funny that lately we've had to encourage a lot of startups to keep going after they realized they have direct competition doing the same thing, but for games we yell at folks who copy but improve.
Does XBox Live support Java? Seems like Notch could just upload the Jar and sell it there if they do. Otherwise this serves an extra market, hopefully some new and distinguishing features rather than just a graphics overhaul that could probably be ported into regular Minecraft as a texture pack... (For those crying idea-stealing, remember Notch got many of his ideas from the modders of InfDev, besides the more obvious points about block engines and sandbox worlds and so on.)
Minecraft has 1.3m sales, if this achieves anything close to that volume I'll be amazed and scratch my head wondering where the point of market saturation is for big-block-engine adventure games.
I never played Minecraft, nor do I have an X360. But seeing this is absolutely disgusting, not even the slightest attempt was made to disguise wholesale copying! Awful, I hope this doesn't see the light of day.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 46.5 ms ] threadI love Minecraft. I hope Notch does something to stop this. I'd love to see Minecraft on the Xbox, but not if it means stealing someone else's idea.
As a personal example, search for Robokill in this game's release forum post:
https://www.mochimedia.com/community/forum/topic/game-showca...
I'm not bitter - Robokill did well and I'd be surprised if they made even 5% as much as I did - but it's hard to argue that the market place is better off because this game exists. Robokill itself is not in any way original - it's basically a mixture of Smash TV and Diablo - but I think it was a fresh enough take on existing genres to earn its place in the market.
As long as this Minecraft inspired title tries to be different in some way, though, I have no problem with it.
I still think that clones are perfectly alright, even good, for everyone.
[0] The world is made of destroyable blocks and has low-res, non-aliased textures. That’s about it.
I find it funny that lately we've had to encourage a lot of startups to keep going after they realized they have direct competition doing the same thing, but for games we yell at folks who copy but improve.
Minecraft has 1.3m sales, if this achieves anything close to that volume I'll be amazed and scratch my head wondering where the point of market saturation is for big-block-engine adventure games.
C# should make a port job fairly easy.
Minecraft clone coming to Xbox Live Indie Games: FortressCraft