I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat.
It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money.
I've no idea about the exact mechanics of the copying - whether he just copied the idea, or copied the implementation from the source, or indeed used parts of the source in his game - but I think these are largely small differences. The real problem I have is it seems like this is basically how our society works - somebody thinks of something cool, then somebody else gets rich / famous / tenure off it, while the person who did most of the work is lucky to get a footnote.
Again, that both games are made of blocks (not voxels, for the record) is a sidenote. They are completely different styles of game.
When a game comes out with a 2D tilemap it's not thought of as a clone of the games that came before it. Why does extending the concept to 3D and making it user-editable make it a clone?
I generally agree. To be honest, I wasn't so much making a general moral judgement about copying. Hamlet was a copy. Bach was a music kleptomaniac. Execution is way more important. I just find minecraft a particularly uncreative copy, and personally like zachatronics - so I 'don't like that he ripped it off'. Which he did. I don't think this dislike could or should extend to other copied pieces of work, games or otherwise.
I like Zachtronics, but I really, really don't get how you view Minecraft as a ripoff of Infiniminer.
Infiniminer is a competitive class-based game in a constrained arena. The goal is to get a higher score than your opponents.
Minecraft is a survival game in an infinite world. The goal is to build a base and progress through a tech tree, or to build things for fun.
Ace of Spades is closer to being a ripoff of Infiniminer, though with more of a focus on combat. Minecraft is a game that has a similar (but more polished) aesthetic but with completely different rules.
Star Wars is not a ripoff of Star Trek just because they're both set in space. They're fundamentally different at every level.
Well, the explanation is probably that I've been taken in by a meme. I should have added a disclaimer that I've not actually played infiniminer a good deal earlier in the thread, and my feeling that Minecraft was derivative was almost entirely based on its timing, visual similarity, and my understanding that the basic mechanic (digging through voxel based terrain) was the same.
An additional factor that made me extra-specially susceptible to this meme is that when I played minecraft, I immediately thought it was essentially a dumbed-down version of dwarf fortress with better graphics. What I saw at the time as the basic innovation - which I think is still what makes dwarf fortress exceptional, is a game that uses a tiling or cubic grid to allow for real creative play, with an attendant focus on mining, survival, and craft.
I don't think Star Wars is a rip-off of star trek, but it absolutely is and was always intended as a derivative work. All the ideas and content was developed in earlier sci-fi. Star Wars was an interesting contribution in terms of execution - and that's exactly why I like it. It had genuinely new ideas about set design and special effects. Minecraft, on the other hand, has no new ideas I can think of.
I still think it's a good game - and I'm very happy that when my kid hits the age where they wanna play games, I can point them to Minecraft and be pretty certain they're not going to be loading naked kidnapped people into a sausage factory (I played GTA2 when I was a kid), or squashing people with tanks, or irradiating them until they turn into mush. I mean, I guess they'll do those things at some point to, but it's nice that there's an actual honest-to-goodness kids game out there that doesn't suck.
It's not even execution, it's luck (and marketing). Minecraft was marketed as a toy, even though 3d modeling tools already existed (I'm assuming) but they were marketed as professional tools for trained artists.
Minecraft wasn't marketed at all, outside of some posts on the Indie Gaming Source dev forums. Its explosive success was entirely word-of-mouth. Of course Microsoft is pushing it all over now that they own it, but it was a megahit long before that happened.
It's true they make less money, but I think ToadyOne is happier than Notch is. I don't know that Notch is as happy with the way things turned out as you imply.
> I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat.
Infiniminer is a class-based team FPS in a closed arena. The only thing Minecraft shares with it is the block mechanic.
There's a mental quirk that seems to happen with game mechanics. Do something first, you're a genius; do it for the 100th time, you're iterating on classic gameplay; but do it for the second time, and you're a thief. I don't think it has to be that way.
> It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money.
Last I heard, Toady was making $100,000+ a year off of Dwarf Fortress donations. Zach Barth has been making games full-time since SpaceChem, cranking out successful titles once every year or two for most of the decade. Notch, meanwhile, appears to be miserable, bitter, and directionless.
I think the thing is, you give Zach money, he uses it to make even better games. He's clearly had a good artist helping him out with some of his recent stuff. You give ToadyOne money, he uses it to say 'I'm gonna spend the next ten years developing the magic system'. That's because they're exceptionally creative people. Notch comes across as more of an ordinary guy - smart, sure, capable, also, but fundamentally ordinary. So while if you gave Zach Notch-level money, I'd expect him to make Zachatronics into a game studio, or if you gave ToadyOne - I can't even imagine where that would lead. On the other hand, if you give most ordinary people shitloads of cash, it just makes them directionless, and puts them in a nasty position where they don't work on other people's projects because they don't have to, but they don't enjoy working on their own, because they're fundamentally not too good on new ideas.
So that's why it'd be nice when somebody who's come up with a really new idea meet some success - they'd probably have some ideas about what to do with it.
> Notch, meanwhile, appears to be miserable, bitter, and directionless.
I don't think that's because of either the money or Notch as a persson. It's because of the incredibly toxic community that came up around such a light hearted and simple game.
There's a shitload of backlash whenever he makes anything that's not Minecraft. See his space game with a programmable 6502 or his game jam games or...
Put Toady or Zachtronics under the same microscope and they'll shut down too. Human beings just aren't made for that.
It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money.
I've no idea about the exact mechanics of the copying - whether he just copied the idea, or copied the implementation from the source, or indeed used parts of the source in his game - but I think these are largely small differences. The real problem I have is it seems like this is basically how our society works - somebody thinks of something cool, then somebody else gets rich / famous / tenure off it, while the person who did most of the work is lucky to get a footnote.