The value of a lack of copywrite?

Muzzoid

Im not suggesting its a good idea especially in relation to what we do... but i find this very very interesting and germinates a bunch of ideas in my head.

http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

I'll do a full write up about what my thoughts are after you guys have a listen.

SgtNasty

Interesting talk, a couple things stuck out to me:

A) The game industry does quite a bit of copying as it is. As soon as someone figures out a good design paradigm, or art style, or business model, everyone jumps in with "copies" of the original. This can even be seen in the hardware itself. The main copyright protection that goes on with games are the ip's themselves, halo, gears of war, etc. but usually no one is stupid enough to infringe on that in the first place.

The metric by which she was determining creative success was money. I don't nessecarily agree with that.

arrangemonk

well wouldn't work here
remember that case where some guy with a wolf avatar took a part of davekings concepts and copy pasted it into his concept?( which is exact the same idea as the woman is talking about) problems on images thou is that tey're pretty easy to replicate
but is there a difference between "getting inspiration from"and simply "ctrl-c + ctrl-v"?
(for me getting inspired is a copypastia in a very abstract form but still the same)

eld

And the core structure of a game, the idea, cannot be copyrighted.
Every game developer constantly looks at the seams of other games, to see what makes them tick.

So much like fashion, if the middle eastern shooter becomes popular, nothing stops every other developer from copying that game.

Copyrights exist as a means to prevent people from just ctrl-c -> ctrl-v , and instead forces people to do their own work, or rather, innovate. Because as said, if people were able to (and sometimes those shitty cases happen) copyright ideas, that actually does hurt the industry.

Muzzoid

Yep, I agree this is already pretty much at work.

So far in my experience working making both highly successful original ip on the iphone (fruit ninja) and still highly successful but derivitive games (monsterdash), is that originality is a far more rewarding thing to do if you can pull it off. It is higher risk but it allows for a much higher return if successful.

I guess the main reason why i wanted to post this is that it slightly modifiyed how i thought about this stuff.

I think that if we had a free system that prided itself on being able to build on anything forgetting moral implications of doing so; i think that it would benefit the faster developers and those that have more marketing strategies. Much like how in the fashion industry, the big guys are able to steal the smaller guys designs legally and make a hell of alot more money with thier work.

The metric by which she was determining creative success was money. I don't nessecarily agree with that.

I've always been annoyed with the idea that money is not a good indicator of creative success.
It is, more money means more people care what you are doing. A good game is the perfect synergy of marketing, distribution and enjoyable gameplay.

The way I look at it, the more hours wasted playing my game the more sucessful it is at being a game. Im proud of the fact that if everyone who bought monsterdash (which i did 90% of the art on) played it for for 10 min, My share of collective time spent playing it is 2 years.

but is there a difference between "getting inspiration from"and simply "ctrl-c + ctrl-v"?

I think this is irrelevant, if you do this even the fans will revolt. You wont have a consistent style and a good product.

I pose you this question, have you ever seen a careless copying of art that was "better" than the original? I sure as hell havent.

In the end I think that the innovators win out regardness of copywrite or not simply because theya re the first to the market with an idea. And nobody wants to be seen playing the shitty knockoff version. (well only a minority)