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In the same week, two stories about cloning are making various rounds. One involves Triple Town, a neat puzzle-sim game from Spry Fox, being cloned on the iOS App Store. The other story involves Zynga (predictably) first offering to buy and then copying Tiny Tower. Both have resulted in the original inventors calling out the clone for what it is in public.
Should anything be done?
“The Worm has turned”, Jack Nicholson once said in the otherwise-forgettable Wolf, “and it is now packing an Uzi.”
I’m minded of this quote when reading various reactions to the concerted move by the established entertainment industry to stop piracy. It’s not just SOPA and PIPA, but also ACTA in Europe and a variety of national-level legislative campaigns which propose draconian, over-reaching controls to protect content industries at the expense of all others.
The normally-placid geek industries, which prefer to make stuff rather than lobby, are nettled to such an extent that key figures are declaring that it’s time to saddle up. That it’s time to lobby and cajole on issues like relaxing copyright and patents for real rather than talk about it. That it’s time to, as Paul Graham wrote last Friday, kill Hollywood.
So do you want to take up the call?
(This may seem off topic compared to this blog’s usual focus, but it’s relevant as a discussion of user interfaces, as well as one of next year’s bigger trends that will affect the games industry.)
Metro, to hear the folks from Redmond tell it, is the future. It’s in phones. It’s in the Xbox 360. Pretty soon it will be in PCs and tablets too. It’s a new marketing story about a new paradigm for a new decade.
But (for me at least) something is wrong: Metro leaves me oddly cold. I dislike the metaphor of tiles, and the way that it seems overly concerned with guiding people to content. It looks pretty and yet fiddly. It’s over-reliant on user memory and arcane actions. Its implementation on the Xbox 360 is downright bad.
More than that, it’s telling a different platform story to the one that Microsoft thinks it is, a story of a dumb PC and a more restricted future. At a fundamental level, that bothers me.
The fact that professional makers are feeling under threat is not news. There are calls for tax breaks for game makers and novelists, scrambling efforts to lock down (or at least shut up) the Web through legislation. There is even Rupert Murdoch, once champion of anti-establishmentarian ideals of publishing, tweeting about why a search engine and mass theft are supposedly the same thing.
They have good reason to feel threatened. The Great Recession has accelerated the process of deconstruction. Nobody wants to invest in professional art in a time when we’ve started to use the word “trillion” in everyday conversations about national debts. Add to this the chorus of devaluation that digital distribution has wrought in all creative fields, the largely hazy arguments surrounding piracy, and cultural trends toward lionizing the past (great for back catalogue sales, not so much for new artists).
To many, it looks like Doomsday. However I think not.
Q: What’s the biggest mistake that a successful studio can make?
A: Walking away from its key franchise.
Q: Why would a studio do that?
A: Because the staff get bored.
Q: Why is it a mistake?
A: Well…
Continue reading "The Perils of Franchise Fatigue [Single Franchise Publishing]" »
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