When I was a 21 year old Marine out in Iraq, I had spent every waking moment writing a PHP/MySQL app to manage all of the reconstruction projects being done in western Iraq. It took 3 months to complete, with up to 18 hour days, 7 days/week. I succeeded. The end product was 20,000 lines of code (it could have been fewer lines, but who cares?)
I got sent to the US Embassy in Baghdad to demo the software. I learned that a large contracting firm had been paid millions of dollars to build something similar and they'd been working on it for over a year. They were nowhere near completion. Meanwhile, mine was done, deployed, and integrated into the workflows of various units involved in reconstruction. These contractors looked like fools in comparison. I wrote the code, but it didn't belong to me since I was employed by the government. I generously gave it away, figuring that if it helps end the war faster then I should set aside any petty squabbles on ownership and rights. The contracting company wanted to imitate what I had designed and built. Great, fine, go ahead, have at it. I then came to a startling realization:
Design and build your software so well that nobody will want to go through the painstaking effort necessary to copy you. Give no room for improvement.
Also, there's a lot more to the success of a project than just creating a copy of some software (such as the deployment, integration, and adoption phases). Imitate my software all you want, but good luck getting existing users to switch to yours.
If you're making an original game, keep all of this in mind. If you think people are going to copy your game, you have two huge advantages over them:
1) You're first to market
2) You can set the bar on quality
Here's a very salient example that comes to mind:
"Candy Swipe" vs. "Candy Crush Saga".
Candy swipe was an original work built by a single developer. The game concept and design was great, but the production, sounds, graphics, marketing, and monetization was sub-par.
Someone at King saw and liked his game. Then they copied it and added a buttload of polish. Then they tacked on a skinner box-esque monetization scheme and integrated it with the game design. They called it "Candy Crush Saga", which went on to make ridiculous amounts of cash.
Do we condemn & criticize King for stealing a game from a solo developer, running with it, and making a fortune? No. If King hadn't done that, nobody would have ever heard of or played "Candy Swipe". It would have remained in obscurity, never to be heard of or played. Sure, the solo dev would have sold maybe a few hundred copies over the lifetime of the game, but that doesn't count or matter. In my eyes, that's a failure. ....If only that developer would have spent more time refining the design, polishing, and perfecting the game... King would have never copied him because there was no further room for improvement and because he was first to market. At that point, the only remaining obstacles for the solo dev to overcome would be marketing and going viral. He'd be the legend we all remember, but instead he botched it.
So, learn from all of this. A technically sophisticated but incomplete game is okay. A completed game is better, even if its orders of magnitude more simple. A completed game which has been highly polished and refined to the point of no further improvement is superior to everything else.
Nothing < Something < Technically challenging & incomplete < Complete < Complete, polished, refined
It's at least remarkable. There even are posts on sites like Elance where people are simply asking for someone to write them a Timberman clone for a certain amount of money. I personally think it's a bad think, and there are some similarities with the videogame crash of 1983 (high volume, low quality).
