Casual Games, Cloning, and Discussion Thereof

By: Derek Yu

On: November 30th, 2007

Russell Carroll, all around nice guy, marketing director at Reflexive, and the webmaster of Game Tunnel, has an interesting op-ed on Gamasutra called “”http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16426">Cloning Created the Casual Business." In it he talks about the impact of cloning on the casual games industry (now apparently worth $2.25 billion).

The argument has been made that clones donâ€™t pay the bills, so developers shouldnâ€™t make them. I would argue the opposite is true. Clones do sell, which is why people keep making them. Money drives the casual games market just like it does any other industry. Where there is no money, people take a different path. Clones are being made because they are often more lucrative than original titles.

Russ reveals that the average Hidden Object game on Reflexive sells roughly 3 games to the sale of every average “original” title. I think this indicates that clones can sell. It doesn’t, however, convince me that they sell better than original games (note: which is not the argument Russ is trying to make), since a number of important comparisons are overlooked, such as the sales of clones to the originals that spawned them. Nor does it speak to the quality of the original games that didn’t sell so well. I think clones are just easier to make, and probably give a better return on investment than your average original game, which is why people make them.

It’s interesting to note that Digital Eel, the developers behind Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, have just made two more of their games free, and have also released a $10 casual matching game, Soup du Jour. The game has a neat physics-ey aspect, but it seems like quite a deviation from their other games, so I wonder…

My attitude about casual games has vacillated from derision, to indifference, to some appreciation (for bringing in non-gamers to the fold, so to speak). Now, I think it’s a bit of all three. I still hope that “core” and “hardcore” developers will not see casual cloning as an easy way out. My belief is still that a good original game will outsell any clone, and creating an original title has side benefits, like curing cancer.

I’m serious, they did a study where they placed two monkeys with cancer in a basement and had them make games. One monkey made a clone of Diner Dash, and the other made an original title about dealing with cancer as a monkey. The Diner Dash monkey died after a week with a tumor the size of a minivan, and the other monkey survived and lived a long and prosperous life! Look it up on the internet.

Anyway, thanks, Russ, for the article, and I hope to see more like it!

Posted in Business, Casual, Community | Tags: DigitalEel, RussCarroll

Agatha Christie

There also was a third monkey, which was obsessed with its genitalia…
BigBossSNK

Orson Wells agreed to any role, however frivolous, all so that he’d be able to finance his own independent productions.
Clint Eastwood shot “The Rookie” the same year he filmed “White hunter Black heart”.
What I’m saying is, if the independant gaming market is to grow, it needs to incorporate well established business practices, like financing your niche dream through mass market products.
The reason why casual cloning isn’t used (yet) is twofold
-Big publishers don’t “do” casual gaming and
-Small developers aren’t as business savvy as one would hope.
I for one would embrace a Laissez-faire on this issue.
I would also point out this page:
http://www.gameproducer.net/2007/10/16/su-doku-live-sales-stats-27000-income/
rinkuhero

That’s a good article about that Sudoku game, but spending $13000 to make $27000 more back is nice but is probably out of the reach of most indies who don’t have that original amount lying around.

Wasn’t Orson Welles’ last role before he died was as the voice of a villain in the horrible Transformers animated movie? D:
Palad

So is it just me, or does that look like a mustachioed phallus?

…

Probably just me.
BigBossSNK

True about Orson, but his reason for dodgy performances wasn’t avarice. Rather, a never yielding desire to get things done his way.
In the true spirit of all that is indie, go make some money any which way you can. Then invest them on what you consider important. If you don’t, someone else will. It’s just a matter of market satiation.
moi

There have been a conjecture that the “casual cloning market” of today is exactly the same as the early arcade games market of the eighties: a lot of cloning and cheap games produced for quick profit with a few gems in between.
I’ve tried to keep my mind open on the subject, but I can definitely not accept this theory. As bad and unoriginal as some of the earlier arcade games where, they were never as bad as the casual crap thet is served today.
These casual games are produced based only on sales statistics, I mean this is even worse than pornography. Porno will at least try once in a while the odd unconformist scene to try and reach new markets (“midgets and horses 26 : The wild ride”). But this casual crap is horribly conformist and drastic. For example, most of the greedy idiots at indygamer will frown upon your game if you dare to use more than one mouse button.
etc,etc…(rant)
ZombiePixel

I’m still waiting for someone to show me the team that started off making their fortune on clones and then went on to make their fabulously original “from the heart” game. All precedence points to cloning being an endless death march until you’re bought out by a portal or close up shop completely. You might as well work at a studio.

Russ needs to really qualify his comments with “in our market”. Yes, on Reflexive or a similar portal the clones do much better. But don’t broadstroke the entire online market to be like your casual ghetto :)

Incidentally, I also declare shenanigans on the $2.25 billion valuation.
rinkuhero

That’s a good point too, stats from, say, Manifesto Games might be very different than stats from Reflexive.
JP

None of Carroll’s talking points convince me that cloning is long term sustainable. It’s clearly short term profitable, but then so was the firehose of horrible 2600 games leading up to the crash of 1983.

The fact that the guy’s a marketer gives the whole thing a suspicious “Please make my job as easy as possible” cast.
krinkle

>moi said:

>There have been a conjecture that the
>â€œcasual cloning marketâ€ of today is
>exactly the same as the early arcade games
>market of the eighties: a lot of cloning
>and cheap games produced for quick profit
>with a few gems in between.

Not only the arcade games, and not only the eighties. This has been going on since games were first created. Most notably, I think, in the glut of second-rate platformer games for consoles. Hundreds of knockoff games where the only appreciable difference is a sprite and tile swap. Jump, squish, shoot, repeat… there was no end to these kinds of games, and they were all pretty much clones of SMB, Contra, etc. with different powerups and intro screens.

I think the reason people notice it more with these match three casual games is it’s more difficult to hide the fact that they’re clones just by switching up the theme. They’re more simplistic by nature. You clear one board at a time with a single mouse click. The story (if there even is one) is completely secondary… you can’t fake it by saying the little sprite you’re controlling is a cartoon duck seeking treasure rather than an Italian plumber trying to save a princess. No, you’re clicking on gems, balls, or tiles of some sort and the theme is very apparently arbitrary.

Unless you’re really paying attention it’s harder to detect clones of platformers, FPS’s, shmups, etc. because the complexity in interactivity and feedback is orders of magnitude higher than your average point-and-click match three game. Casual games are easier to bag on because they’re so obvious, and that gives off the impression that the developers are just shameless. Which they very may be.
failrate

@Palad: I think everyone sees the chef as being an anthropomorphic severed member. We’re just in denial.

@cloning: Even classic board games cloned the shit out of each other. Look at any Milton-Bradley game (Chutes and Ladders, Monopoly, Parcheesi). It is a clone. It is likely one successful clone out of what were probably dozens or hundreds of clones at the time.
Anthony Flack

Krinkle – although people do often talk about platformer clones or shoot-em-up clones or the like, the reality is that these kinds of games are quite complex systems, with quite a lot of scope for diversity, even among superficially similar games (like shooters, which non-shooter fans will often proclaim to be all alike). Whereas the cloning going on in the casual games market is more often based on extremely simply games and is often little more than a graphical re-skin.

I watched the PC shareware market develop from the DIY promise of the early days into the corporate sweatshop it has become, and way back then I was very vocally outspoken about where I thought all this gameplay cloning was taking us, and that collectively, we ought to discourage clonemakers and not promote their work. Back then, it was mostly uncredited ripping off of older games. I wondered aloud what would happen when shareware authors inevitably started to rip each other off in the same way.

Yeah, well I shut up about all that some years ago, when it became obvious that it was all a lost cause. PC shareware is all but dead to me now. It’s interesting that the future that I had hoped for the shareware scene is now found in PC freeware.