The Outsider's View by Russell Carroll

The Cloning Innovation (May 3, 2006)

A common statement in regards to the game industry, and in-fact most industries, is that the 'me-too' approach is a poor strategy to becoming financially successful. While that may be the case in mainstream gaming, the casual sphere seems to actually flow exactly opposite to the rule.

In casual games, following the leader often leads to rewards even larger than the leader reaped. This is no-where better illustrated than in the phenomenon of cloning games where developers who follow spend much less to create their games, which are near replicas of the original, and find financial rewards similar to the leader.

For example, switching pieces to match 3 in a row may have started with Bejeweled, but the games Jewel Quest, 7 Wonders, Atlantis Quest and a large list of others have done little more than make slight modifications on the formula, creating sometimes MEGA-hits that provide substantial financial return for little investment into the game beyond new game art and minor variations on the original game's mechanic.

'Newer' games that come out and are popular, such as Zuma, lead to a flood in the market of similarly styled games that are hard to tell apart. While in this specific example Zuma does hold the premium position, the typical market analyst would suppose in their thoughts that the clones would in the end be losing money by chasing after the leader, but this hasn't been the case in casual games.

Perhaps deriving from the ease and low cost of making a clone, as well as the public's apparent unawareness of what is a clone and what is the original, clones are wildly successful.

The push towards clones is aided by the majority of new concepts not being readily accepted by the market and yielding a lower amount of financial success than reusing the same play mechanic from an existing popular game. Hence Cake Mania, a modification on Diner Dash is a much safer bet financially than Plantasia or Spacebound.

While innovation is a current buzz-word thrown around the gaming industry, casual games have ignored the word focusing instead on 'polish' or the game's visual and visceral quality as well as supposed 'fun' in trying to appeal to its market. Certainly non-innovative or hacks would be as reasonable an explanation for the derivative nature of casual games as fun is, but as adding innovation to a game seems to have little impact on its financial success there can be little impetus for being inventive. Taken as a whole, it creates an interesting phenomenon where Casual games are eschewing innovation and following the typically disastrous 'me-too' strategy with amazingly strong financial results.

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By: Russell Carroll
Posted: Wednesday May 03, 2006