Clone Wars: What Copycats Really Do To The Social Games Industry
Yesterday, Backyard Monsters developer Kixeye sent a letter to press representatives claiming that Kingdoms of Camelot developer Kabam “copied our game” with its upcoming title, Edgeworld. Kixeye is calling for action on the part of the social games industry — but it’s not clear what action anyone should take.
Backyard Monsters is a real-time strategy game released in May of 2010 where players harvest resources to construct a base that eventually produces different types of monsters. These monsters can be sent out to attack other players’ bases, thereby netting more resources. When the game launched, it had a gender neutral art style with arguably “cute” monsters. Since that time, Kixeye has retouched the art for more “male” appeal and added a series of gameplay tweaks and new features that enhance the RTS elements of the game.
Edgeworld is a space-themed real-time strategy game in development by Kabam that’s been live on Facebook in “evaluation mode” since June. Kabam has asked us to withhold detailed descriptions of the game’s mechanics as part of a reviews embargo. In the open letter to the social games industry, Kixeye CEO Will Harbin claims that, “There is no question that the engineers of Edgeworld had Backyard Monsters open in one window while they coded the copy in another.” Included in the letter is a side-by-side comparison of the two games (Backyard Monster on the right):
When asked for comment on Kixeye’s accusation, Kabam CEO Kevin Chou replied to all press outlets with the following statement: “Our team draws ideas and inspiration from many sources, including movies, pop culture, science fiction, literature, history and, most importantly, from our players. We’re flattered by the fact that others in the industry are commenting on Edgeworld. It validates our belief that Edgeworld is a great game worthy of attention, and we’ll have more to share about the game soon.”
The question for us is a two-part affair: 1) When do we call it “copying” as opposed to “drawing inspiration” in social games and 2) what impact does copying really have on the industry?
The first part is a subjective argument. When Backyard Monsters was first released, our ISG reviewer compared it to established PC strategy games Envoy and Civilization. When Kabam’s Kingdoms of Camelot was released in 2009, it was also compared to Envoy and Civilization. One could argue that all strategy games — be they real-time or asynchronous — will be compared to other strategy video games dating all the way back to 1992 PC game Dune II. Some mechanics implemented in certain games, should they prove effective, will consistently turn up in future games made by other companies because that mechanic is vetted for developers and trusted by players. The same holds true for other game genres on Facebook, which is why its very easy to spot similarities between Gardens of Time and Mystery Manor in the hidden objects genre and between Empires & Allies and Army Attack in the asynchronous combat genre.
“It’s a bit of a gray area,” Harbin admits to ISG. “You kind of call it when you see it.” Even so, he says, Kabam very clearly crossed a line in developing Edgeworld. “There are just way too many similarities between the games to call it a [game that used Backyard Monsters] as a starting off point. Users have come to us to ask if we licensed the Backyard Monsters engine to Edgeworld. Some of our users are even asking us for support on it. That’s a pretty compelling argument that it’s [too] similar.”
Even if you could call a game a clone without a second thought, it’s not something that can immediately dismissed as a bad thing. From the traffic and revenue perspective, clones have actually performed quite well on Facebook. Take, for example, Restaurant City and Cafe World. The games looked identical at launch and both went on to achieve monthly and daily active users in the millions. Both games are still running almost two years later at or above 20% retention. Other clone-heavy genres like farming sims and aquarium games are still getting new entries that reproduce identical game mechanics to the earliest titles and those games have usually found traction. Most important of all, Facebook has no rules against copying and only a handful of larger game developers have ever publicly pursued legal action against other developers perceived as copying its games. It’s usually Zynga doing the suing or the one being sued.
The problem of cloning perhaps lies in the long-term — and it may be more a problem for the Facebook platform than for individual developers. Kixeye admitted in its open letter that Edgeworld has no impact on Backyard Monsters’ performance. Facebook’s Sean Ryan, however, recently expressed his desire to see developers invest in other genres on Facebook — ones that aren’t saturated with copycats. Only by expanding the platform’s offerings, he says, can Facebook and its social game developers hope to tap into new audiences and retain users through quality gaming experiences.
That’s exactly what Kixeye did when it launched Backyard Monsters. Strategy games weren’t even close to real-time in 2010 and of the asynchronous strategy games, there weren’t that many. The developer continued to develop in the genre, producing the truly real-time Battle Pirates and now the upcoming War Commander — which Kixeye freely admits is inspired by the PC Command & Conquer RTS series from Westwood Studios and later EA.
Meanwhile, other developers have been slow to catch up to Kixeye’s progress. Kabam’s most recently launched title, Global Warfare, was still using asynchronous combat established in its other strategy games from Kingdoms of Camelot on through Dragons of Atlantis. Empires & Allies and Army Attack also haven’t attempted the feat, suggesting that the RTS genre on Facebook is still pretty small.
If the so-called “Clone Wars” are truly detrimental to the social games industry, you’d think Facebook would take a more proactive approach to discouraging copycats. You’d also expect to see more legal action being taken in clear-cut cases of copying as with Backyard Monsters and Edgeworld. As it stands, however, there’s nothing to stop Kabam from cloning whatever game it wants on the Facebook platform — and very likely attracting a higher level of attention to its game as the mid-level developer has a larger advertising budget than most developers in its category. As we’ve seen in our The Better Game series of articles, however, games that have a lot in common do not seem to starve each other out of users no matter which developer had the bigger advertising budget. Rather, they do succeed in expanding the genre as a whole, creating more customers that come to play their type of game.
“It’ll be interesting to see how [Kabam] will expand their market with cloning,” Harbin says. “If you look at gaming history in general, there have been a lot of copycat developers out there and they typically haven’t [succeeded in the long term] unless they did it really well.”
In which case, the lesson to take from Kixeye and Kabam in the clone wars is: If you’re going to copy, copy only the best.
July 27th, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Another element to this discussion is the fact that there are no sales penalties for cloning games on Facebook. In console video game land, retailers only have so much shelf space to give games and they don’t want to blow it all and the eight different first-person shooters. Moreover, gamers are probably only going to pay $60 just the one time in 6 to 12 months to get a game that scratches their genre itch. With social games, there’s unlimited shelf space and essentially no opportunity cost to me as the player if I spend a Credit here and a Credit there on defense upgrades in different RTS games.
Also, Zynga’s the only one involved in lawsuits because they’ve got the money the spend. You don’t see Lolapps or GSN suing anybody. Just sayin’…
July 27th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
Ultimately people will play what they like, regardless of how derivative of other games it may or may not be, and all of the great works our culture cherishes – games or otherwise – are in fact copies of things that came before.
Having read this article, I’m not entirely sure what its thesis was or why so much time and space is being devoted to such a non-issue. The act of creation inherently involves emulating what you know, whether you’re making music, designing a light bulb, or creating a video game. This isn’t right or wrong; it just is.
Seeing as this site mostly exist as an excuse to sell AppData Pro subscriptions, why not pull some historical data and provide some hard numbers on the effect of copy-cat games have on the originals? That seems like a much more interesting article. At it stands, this post has a lot of words that amount to very little.
July 27th, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Actually, Travis, our site exists to help the social games industry thrive. What historical data would you like to see, exactly? And how would you filter the games such that only “clones” were compared to an original game as opposed to games that share a genre but are not clones? Restaurant City and Cafe World made an easy example — all we needed to do was tell you that neither game failed to back up the argument that cloning doesn’t automatically kill a game.
But what about Restaurant City and Diner Dash? They’re both restaurant games — but if you’ve played them both, they’re very clearly unrelated beyond the genre. And now, Diner Dash is getting the axe while Restaurant City keeps on trucking. By pulling the charts for both those games, could we make the argument that only restaurant games that clone are successful? That’s shaky ground, and we wouldn’t want to make wrong-headed assumptions based on traffic patterns that are easily impacted by factors outside the genre — such as advertising, level of Facebook virality at time of release, and any publishing deals signed after launch that may have put the game in a larger cross-promotion network.
In other words, Travis, we don’t like to whip out the AppData unless we know we can make an assumption consistent with the data. Through The Better Game series and the restaurant sim example, as well as the separate article we linked to that covered the aquarium genre, we feel we supported the argument that cloning does not necessarily ruin a game. We cannot find much AppData evidence to support the argument that cloning is unhealthy — and in that respect, you could argue cloning a “non-issue.” However, it happens all the time and even Facebook says they’re sick of it. So perhaps an issue should be made of it for the benefit of the industry as a whole
Seriously, where’s my Facebook Japanese RPG? How many more farm sims do I have to sit through before somebody makes that game?
July 27th, 2011 at 4:36 pm
As an advisor to Kixeye, I’ve watched the team go through tireless and arduous iterations to define a new frontier for social gaming over the past two years. The results have been tremendous and the company continues to outpace the industry in innovation with emphasis on unique user experience and user interaction. These innovations have cost the company considerable time and dollar investment.
Anyone who would play Edgeworld(Kabam) would immediately notice the immediate re-use of primary developed Interaction Mechanics of the Backyard Monsters(Kixeye) game which are not limited to:
• The shape and building of the bases
• The battle flinging/transporting of the monsters/marines
• The communication interaction with other players
I could continue…
While there are those would argue that its okay to blatantly copy expensive and proprietary developed techniques from competitors in the space, I would submit its short sighted to downright wrong.
While the old adage is true, that imitation is a form of flattery, we are now in uncharted territory in the social technology world that we live in and its blasphemy to apply. Copying the Design, Innovation, and IP with blatant disregard much less acknowledgement has repercussions by threatening to drive the industry that has the ability to provide for All (the consumer, companies and employees) into a world of ruthless competition where every stake holder loses.
We can and should hold ourself to a higher bar.
There is a business side to business and there is a spiritual side where leadership has to responsibility to provide a platform to innovate but not at all costs. When leadership or industry compromises its respect for the vision and hard work of others, ultimately…
• Employees never get the satisfaction for innovating on their own
• Companies ultimately self select employees that never develop
and ultimately leave the entity
• Customers suffer by being fed repetitive and continually unfulfilling products by larger entities taking advantages of smaller entities for their own ambition.
We’ve seen what happens in other parts of the World when we don’t. The innovation of America is leveraged for free which is not fair.
We should know better as leaders and hold ourself to a Higher Bar.
July 27th, 2011 at 4:59 pm
As an avid gamer and professional in the space, I was thrilled to see to some one finally have the chutzpah to call out the rampant cloning that goes on in the social gaming space. In order for hardcore gamers to take “Facebook games” seriously the large resources at these companies needs to be allocated towards innovation instead of duplication.
July 27th, 2011 at 10:00 pm
As rightfully pointed out, copying games has been part of the industry basically from it’s inception. But no metric data will ever show that cloning is unhealthy for the industry in general What would Restaurant City’s numbers be like, for example, had Cafe World never been released? I certainly can’t blame a social game developer for cloning a game when it obviously makes business sense. But I do think it’s fair to say that the ease of cloning discourages developers from taking risks in design, which is unhealthy for the industry. This also makes Zynga the unstoppable Behemoth when you take into account their warchest for legal action, massive resources to clone whatever innovation they come across, their ability to cross-promote between users and their now public “special relationship” with Facebook. It’s good to be the King.
July 28th, 2011 at 3:16 am
Was a fan of Kabam until I got wind of this. Respect was further flung off with Kevin’s canned response. Now that I think of it, I am pretty sure I dodged a bullet not having a conversation with him at the last inside social games conference.
What a shame.
July 28th, 2011 at 3:20 am
Oh and one more note to developers, perhaps building your own engine that is not based off of open-space might prove helpful to keep your game a bit harder to copy. Furthermore Obfuscating your code on top of that would be a huge benefit as prying eyes would have a difficult time decompiling your code.
That way, copy cats would have to further innovate their “inspiration” off of your game if it came down to that.
July 28th, 2011 at 9:43 am
At the end of the days all the cloning going on will be extremely detrimental to the social gaming industry and seems a very short-sighted strategy. Most companies seem to be happy to stick to the same lazy “social” (ie. spammy) features, which means many new games feel like reskins of previous games in which you can exactly predict what will happen after a few minutes – the newly released Millionaire Boss being a good example for that. It’s painfully obvious the level of innovation in social games has so far been shameful compared to what is happening on iOS, for instance.
If nothing changes, players will move on and at best the market will contract (and this seems to have already started), or at worst will completely crash, similar to what happened in 1983 – flooding of the market by mediocre games all cloning each other, with supply ending up exceeding demand.
Also, I think your article is a bit misleading regarding the cloning between Restaurant City and Cafe World. It seems to imply both games more or less cloned each other, whereas Restaurant City was released months before Cafe World, and art-wise the latter is a blatant copy of the former.
July 28th, 2011 at 12:22 pm
@Momo — I didn’t bother to call out who came first because the thesis is that it doesn’t matter who comes first. They both still get traffic and still make money; and even if one “beat” the other to market, that doesn’t guarantee them the larger cut.
July 28th, 2011 at 8:08 pm
There is one other argument regarding the impact of cloning on the social gaming industry: The results thus far of EA’s purchase of Playfish and Disney of Playdom. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always suspected that part of the rationale behind these acquisitions was that it gave Playfish and Playdom access to intellectual property that served as a defense against cloning. You can clone a restaurant game, a farming game, a city game, etc. But you can’t copy Mickey Mouse or John Madden Football. However, I don’t think this has gone as well for their Playfish or Playdom as was expected. Both have been surpassed by Wooga, who has focused on targeting non-English speaking markets with games that are not too different than some of Zynga (Monster World) or PopCap (puzzle). EA’s IP may be serving Playfish ok, but Playdom has yet to produce one Disney brand title other than ESPNU College Town (nothing from the Disney proper or Marvel libraries??). It’s all speculation, but who knows what other corporate strategies these two might have chosen if the threat of cloning wasn’t a factor.
July 29th, 2011 at 8:34 am
The pattern of copying/imitating businesses is not new, nor is it constrained to social gaming. It occurs when there are above average returns and barriers to entry are low.
Within the gaming sphere, look at Dune/C&C/Warcraft over time. Same thing in the last five years with simulation games (Rollercoaster, Zoo, Office, Farm, City). Outside of the gaming when there is a successful business, people pile in. Go to Seattle and you will see countless roadside coffee stands. Some people innovate, like the folks that have their baristas serve coffee in different costumes every day, but at the core, all the businesses are the same.
When there are low barriers to entry, like there are in social gaming (lots of shared code repositories, no physical distribution, easy customer acquisition), when someone is receiving an above market return of their investment, others will enter that space pushing the return to normal levels. It is completely normal for people to go after the tremendous amounts of money that a Zynga/Kabam/… are making.
From a personal standpoint, I hope this new wave of gaming does not destroy the PC/console market with great games like Red Dead Redemption and Total War…
July 29th, 2011 at 8:02 pm
As mentioned by another poster, most console gamers treat “social” games like a joke so it’s not going to be destroying the PC/console market any sooner. Fact of the matter is that there is far more socializing going on in Wifi-ready console games and the typical MMO than anything FB has to offer (with Tetris Battle and the Worms clones like DDTank being the only exceptions).
It’ll be interesting to see how things go on from here though. Both Mobage and Gree have been sued numerous times already for blatantly ripping off console games and copyrighted material (e.g., anime characters) in Japan and it won’t be the least bit surprising if the same thing will carry over to in the States.
July 29th, 2011 at 10:56 pm
It is not surprising that Kabam is ripping off BYM when its big hit, Kingdoms of Camelot, was a ripoff of the original Travian game, with some slight changes. Travian was the original game in that design, and Evony and the rest ripped Travian off. They are basically the SAME GAME with minor changes.
BYM is the first new style of game in FB for gamers in a long time. It broke new ground. It is nothing like the extremely lame Travian clones that were played out years ago.
The only way BYM can be protected legally is through patent law. You can’t copyright or trademark game design elements. If you are the first to design a type of game, and you want to prevent clones, you’d have to seek patent protection and then file enforcement lawsuits. Just the fact that a patent exists should stop clones, because investors aren’t going to want to sink money into lawsuit-bait.
July 29th, 2011 at 11:01 pm
By the way, the only way Backyard Monsters can be compared to Evony or Kingdoms of Camelot is if the person making the comparison hasn’t played the games and has no idea of what they are talking about. This reminds me of when Lucasfilm sued Battlestar Galactica saying it was a knockoff of Star Wars. Anyone who knows science fiction knows that is a retarded, ignorant statement. Of course since lawyers and judges tend to have no clue when it comes to things like science fiction and video games, they can make ridiculous statements quite easily.
August 2nd, 2011 at 8:08 pm
Honestly, who freaking cares?
Will Harbin just sounds like a whiner. If you want to develop games on face book, you need to live with the consequence of someone leveraging your ideas.
You did it to others, now they are doing it to you. Guess pirating others’ ideas is only pirating when someone is doing it to you and not the other way around.
ridiculous
August 2nd, 2011 at 10:26 pm
i play backyard monsters and edgeworld heavily. i dont think the games are similar at all, other than the fact they games are set up so you build a base and attack eachother
at the beginning of the game, they do seem similar. snipe and splash, 4 resource makers, silo, and a town hall
when you level up in bym, you get blocks, and you make a forretress like base, where you have monster guardians, pathing, and all sorts of towers. as you level up, you build a catapult, later, champions. flying monsters for added strategy.
in edgeworld, there are no blocks or booby traps, meaning that your base is laid out as a ranging system. as you level up in edgeworld, there is no catapult like function in the game, meaning that CF is unstoppable except by the use of long range monsters, something that bym added AFTER edgeworld started production with the dave rockets. building a base strategically in edgeworld means you have to have a high CF and keep your buildings protected.
base design and attacking are all clearly different as far as basic strategy. advanced strategy can be compared to the bym beta, at a time when the game was meant to attract a different type of audience.
the point is, they are different, VERY different, if you get to know them well.
August 5th, 2011 at 5:45 am
Well edge world is a copy cat so i guess its casual collective(kixeye)VS kabam (copy cat)
Backyard monsters:
Command a monster army and defend your backyard.
Kabam:
Build and defend your base from hostile forces. Command an army of elite soldiers and epic war machines. Dominate the galaxy!
I think kabam should be shuted down for copying a game i mean really copy a real time strategy game like BYM man kabam is screwed plus the CEO of kabam is talking like a advertiser and not giving a real comment
DOWN WITH KABAM!!!!!!!
And support KIXEYE for life!!!!!!!
August 10th, 2011 at 9:59 am
Just compare the first 3 aliens in EdgeWorld with the first 3 monsters in Backyard Monsters. The beginning of the game is an exact skin clone. Nevermind that they branch off of each other in later levels… that just seems like a post-development decision to not get sued.
August 20th, 2011 at 2:39 pm
Recently I tried first Backyard Monsters and then Edgeworld.
I absolutely hated the feel of BYM and stopped playing.
When I tried Edgeworld though, I loved it.
Maybe they cater to different audiences. Competition like that isn’t bad.
The comparison is a lot like Mac vs. PC.
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