UPDATE: Gamenauts responds in less than ten minutes. Holy smokes, "extreme hypocrisy" indeed.

Last night, a representative of Gamenauts sent me this message on Twitter, completely out of the blue:

Wait a second here, let's back up a minute. We need some context: do you remember the Ninja Fishing controversy from this summer?  In case you don't, here's the TLDR version: a studio called Gamenauts (their slogan is "Exploring new frontiers of fun!") plagiarized Vlambeer's Radical Fishing (right down to the names and effects of powerups in the in-game shop!), added a dash of Halfbrick's Fruit Ninja, then contracted successful PR firm TriplePoint to orchestrate their app store launch, subsequently making it into the top 10 best-selling apps during launch week.

[Aside: recently when asked on Twitter how they approached marketing, Gamenauts explained that it was mostly word of mouth. Weird that they just forgot to mention they hired the PR team behind Lego, SEGA, and some of the most successful iOS apps!]

Despite Vlambeer's objections, Gamenauts refused to delay the launch of Ninja Fishing until Vlambeer's own port, Ridiculous Fishing, was ready to ship. I encourage you to draw your own conclusions, but it seems to me that Gamenauts was making a money grab. Vlambeer had done all the prototyping work so Gamenauts didn't have to; they could just rush it to market and grab that lucrative iOS audience. And it worked!

OK, so there's some context for who Gamenauts is.  Next up, this @chardish fellow! During the controversy this summer, an indie game maker named Evan Jones, who is also a senior programmer for a company called Lolapps, wrote a blog post about how blatant plagiarism in games is maybe not a great thing. Then, sometime in the last week, 6waves (the Chinese publisher that purchased Evan's employer Lolapps) announced their new mobile game Yeti Town. Yeti Town, according to every comment and review I've read so far, is a pretty blatant clone of Spry Fox's successful Kindle and Facebook game Triple Town.

I can only conclude based on the message I received from Gamenauts last night that Gamenauts believes that Evan Jones is a hypocrite, and that I am obliged, according to the 2012 Internet Fairness Ordinance, to publicly condemn him personally for his involvement, despite the fact that Triple Town is a successful social and mobile game with an active and growing fanbase on multiple platforms. Radical Fishing is still a relatively unknown Flash game.  This is an important distinction: players who find Yeti Town on the App Store are much more likely to recognize it as a blatant clone (reviews and comments on Yeti Town and Ninja Fishing bear out this observation).

Yeti Town has not, by any measure, become a success. This could change, but as it stands, they are definitely not charting toward a top-10 sales position.

[Aside: Triple Town was a Kindle game long before it was a Facebook game. Thankfully, no one cloned it to Facebook before Spry Fox had the chance to port it themselves. They changed and improved the game, bringing it to a huge new audience in an improved package, and were rewarded for it. Just saying.]

Is it awkward for Evan to be so strongly anti-plagiarism and still work for an employer who commits blatant plagiarism? Of course! But Evan's a grownup. I think he can make his own decisions. Plus, he's a senior programmer for Lolapps; not their game designer, not their CEO. It is extremely unlikely that the higherups at 6waves approached Evan personally and said "we need a game idea!" to which Evan responded "AH HA I know just which game to copy!"  However, Stanley Adrianas, a well-known defender of cloning and CEO of Gamenauts, did exactly that when he "created" Ninja Fishing.

So, unknown, unnamed representative of Gamenauts, that is my comment for Evan. Now, my comments for you: first, you are not being treated unfairly or selectively. Yes, cloning happens all the time. No, Yeti Town is not the same situation as Ninja Fishing.  It's funny; when you defend cloning, you are very eager to see it as a gradient or spectrum with a lot of gray area. But suddenly, when you want to come out against clones, you see it in black and white! A clone is a clone is a clone, eh?  You can't have it both ways.  The games, audience and business models in question are all drastically different, so expecting people to react the same is, well, ridiculous.

Second, even if you were being treated unfairly in this case, I could not possibly care in the slightest.  Scorn from an informed audience is just a risk you take when you blatantly clone the work of beloved creators.  That's your tradeoff; you can either take on the risk of creating something new and interesting (coming up with different answers to the same question, in Rami Ismail's terms), or you can take on the risk of being villified for encroaching on the opportunities of small studios trying to make new things and stay in business.

Anyways. That's what I think about that.