14 DAY TRIAL // Dong Nguyen became famous out of the blue when his inept mobile game Flappy Bird went viral, and saw him getting rich, and many reviewers having to talk about it without stepping on anyone's toes, because, you know, it was a popular game.
Saying that the game is garbage would imply that there is something wrong with the millions of people who displayed an abnormal interest in a proof-of-concept type of thing, a prototype of what might one day be a game from the early '80s, and a bad one at that.
The fact of the matter still remains, it saw a level of popularity that irked many legitimate game makers, and led to a veritable gold rush, with hundreds upon hundreds of developers going through the grueling two hours it takes to put together a similar game, in the hopes of hitting the mother lode.
Of course, that never happened, even with the multitude of variations on the concept, which mostly consisted of tacking miscellaneous pop culture icons to the pixelated aviary specimen.
Attack of the clones
Cloning was a big issue with Flappy Bird, and, of course, Nguyen's latest creation, the ground-breaking Swing Copters, which is basically Flappy Bird with magnets instead of gravity while holding the phone sideways, is now plagued by the same issue.
The Guardian reported that hundreds of clones of Swing Copters had shown to the party uninvited, appearing on the Google Play Store even before the original game's launch, and pushing it way down in the search results page.
Some of the copies have even gone so far as to use the game's actual art (with the tame ones utilizing only similar graphics) and even feature the original creator's name, in an effort to further confuse would-be downloaders.
Of course, both Google and Apple's efforts to take down clones are ongoing, and tons of the bad clones are now gone, but the issue still remains: when you make a game that takes two hours to put together, and it suddenly becomes famous for no good reason, you should expect others to invest the same amount of time into ripping off your undeserved fame.
The pure and simple truth...
Probably the worst thing about this entire thing is that Flappy Bird is also not an original game, but just a rip-off of several older Flash games, which were flooding free game websites a while ago, for the same basic reason: they're really easy to make.
The bad thing is that at least at surface level, this is the direction that Steam is heading in, with a lot of people being dissatisfied with the way Valve is handling the avalanche of new releases, old releases that are new on Steam, and Early Access games.
The good thing is that there is more variety, and you have more chances to find the right game with exactly the twist you are looking for, but the bad one is that there are a lot more halfhearted attempts, with some of them even outright bad, that clutter the pages you are looking through and make it increasingly likely that you'll miss the good ones.
... is rarely pure and sometimes yeah, pretty much still simple
While its entire orders of magnitude make it more difficult to replicate something like Spelunky or Super Meat Boy, the video game equivalents of Flappy Bird, it's also an act that would make the world a better place.
A good copy of Swing Copter would be just another item that future generations will look upon with amazement, just like we do on our rock-worshipping ancestors and on the plague doctors' creepy-looking masks, that were protecting them from the Black Death through the power of pretty flowers that smell nice.
So, unless you make something that is a real video game, as in has actual graphics and gameplay, and requires more effort than a light jog, you're just being part of the problem, no matter who is the clone and who isn't.