Asher Vollmer

The thing I found most interesting about the 2048 was the sudden assortment of variations that immediately followed. It was a perfect example of how the thing we call "culture" works: people recursively sharing their interest in something, often without even trying ("hey, that looks cool. What are you playing?").

It is also a powerful argument in the idea (described very nicely by Lawrence Lessig[1]) that culture and creativity are hindered by copyright. While git (via github.com) made it technologically trivial to clone the source, it's the lack of the "don't touch it - somebody will sue me" barrier that allowed a huge number of people to try their hand at a variation.

To re-use a quote used by Mr. Lessig[2], said by composer John Philip Sousa as the technology of the phonograph (and the ability to restrict the use of music through copyright) quickly became widespread:

"These talking machines are going to ruin artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day, or the old songs. Today, you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left..."

I believe talk about "profit" or "lost opportunities" misses the forest for the trees. The potential of future personal profit on a small game like this can be very hit-or-miss, but the contributions to our shared culture have already been huge. The fact that the game…

This reminds me of when the game 2048 came out, and became hugely popular. It was mostly a clone of the game “Threes”, released a few months prior, which while popular was less so because it was iOS only whereas 2048 could be played freely in the browser.

Here’s the developer’s statement at the time:

http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/

The press and public opinion was mostly on the side of the Threes developer, perhaps because they were already fairly well respected in the indie game dev community; see for instance

https://www.wired.com/2014/05/threes-game-design

I mostly agree with Marco’s advice; but if you have your peers’ trust and approval, calling out your copycats seems like it might work in your favor (by bringing attention to your product for people who only know the copy). Or rather, let your hardcore fans call out the copy cats for you, and be brutally candid in your reaction - the devlog format of the Threes developers’ response was perfect for that.

It was the other way round. If you see the bottom of the 2048 page (https://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/), it is mentioned that "Created by Gabriele Cirulli. Based on 1024 by Veewo Studio and conceptually similar to Threes by Asher Vollmer."

2048 was created over a weekend and is actually a very poorly designed game but went viral, arguably because of HN. The 2048 craze prompted the creators of Threes to publish this incredibly detailed and lengthy writeup on the creative process of Threes: http://asherv.com/threes/threemails. Threes, on the other hand, is truly a very well-executed piece of art and magnificently designed.

The developer of 2048 wrote a post about his viral success here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704800 (couldn't find the article as it has since been removed). Kudos to him for giving credit.

At the end of the day, both games left their mark on the games industry and is an excellent example on the effect of cloning and virality.

I liked Threes a lot, and I bought it.

It was fun. Later I discovered 2048, and it was also fun, and felt like a bit of a different game to me.

The author's reaction to 2048 rubbed me the wrong way a bit. https://asherv.com/threes/threemails/

Thankfully fans of 2048 pushed back and most decided that it's a simple enough game that you can't really expect there not to be clones, or clones of clones. I like this one: https://mdjorge.github.io/doge2048/

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Edit: From the post about Threes:

> We do believe imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but ideally the imitation happens after we’ve had time to descend slowly from the peak -- not the moment we plant the flag.

Fair enough. Things moved too fast for that back then and they move even faster now. A coding AI could help create a ripoff.

That doesn't prove that the NYT's money was poorly spent. Decisions are always slow and expensive, and typing is quick. Copying an existing design is almost always cheaper than making the original.

And in many cases, copying is dramatically cheaper. My favorite example is the iOS game Threes[1], which took 14 months to make and then was cloned on android in ~20 days. It was cloned so quickly that the original developers were accused of copying the cloned version!

But just because the cloners made a functionally identical product doesn't mean they did the same work as the original designers. They got to skip designing anything - which is usually the hardest and slowest part.

[1] http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/

One other thing this deck doesn't go into but has a huge impact (for games at least) is frame rate. Higher frame rates require the GPU to get the work done in a shorter amount of time and make it less likely that the GPU will be able to switch to an idle power save state.

A good example of this in action is the game Threes. The developers implemented a "power save" feature in the game which simply cuts the frame rate in half[0], causing the app to consume noticeably less battery.

0: http://asherv.com/threes/support/