<story><title>Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game</title><url>http://asherv.com/threes/threemails</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Gracana</author><text>&amp;gt; Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product.&lt;p&gt;That was my initial reaction to that statement as well, but upon reading on I realized that&amp;#x27;s not the point they&amp;#x27;re trying to make. They&amp;#x27;re not saying &amp;quot;respect our efforts,&amp;quot; they&amp;#x27;re saying &amp;quot;we spent a year on designing this to be challenging and replayable,&amp;quot; and they go on to provide evidence for their claims of superiority.</text></item><item><author>smacktoward</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I played Threes, and I liked it. And I feel for these guys having to watch everybody and his brother pile on to the idea they had to work so hard to tease out into reality.&lt;p&gt;But here is some hard truth: none of that matters.&lt;p&gt;Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. All they care about is &lt;i&gt;what you have produced&lt;/i&gt; at the end of all that work. What makes it better or worse is how it stacks up relative to the competition -- even the competition that is shamelessly riffing off your core ideas -- not how much sweat you put into it.&lt;p&gt;And I gotta say, having played 2048, 1024 and Threes (the Android versions, at least), I think of the three of them 1024 stands up the best. It takes the core ideas in Threes and sands them down into a game that is easier to grasp and plays faster, without becoming so simple (a la 2048) that it becomes a game a script can beat. Threes makes you swipe-swipe-swipe after every game to get your score and &amp;quot;sign&amp;quot; it (why do I care about signing it?) before you can play again; 1024 just moves you straight on to the next game. Mobile games need to be simple and streamlined, and 1024 understands that imperative better than Threes does.&lt;p&gt;I say all this to help others understand why I would point to this essay as an example of how &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to respond to a problem like a barrage of cloners. It&amp;#x27;s because this essay sees the world entirely from the developers&amp;#x27; perspective -- look how hard we worked! Look how long we labored! Look how subtle our decisions were! -- which is exactly the wrong angle.&lt;p&gt;You want your communications to speak from the &lt;i&gt;customer&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; perspective, not from your own. Customers don&amp;#x27;t give you brownie points for how hard you worked on something. All they care about is how to get the best product for the best price. So if you put your heart and soul into something, and then someone comes along, tweaks your thing and makes it better, the way to respond isn&amp;#x27;t to ask people to respect how hard you worked; it&amp;#x27;s to look closely at the new thing, &lt;i&gt;understand why people like it better&lt;/i&gt;, and then bring that understanding to your next iteration or your next product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gkoberger</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s almost a shame they spent so much time talking about 2048; it takes away from the point I gleaned: to make something simple and &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; takes a ton of work. I&amp;#x27;ve spent months on designs, and felt bad because the end design was so &lt;i&gt;obvious&lt;/i&gt;. &amp;quot;Why didn&amp;#x27;t I think of that in the first place?&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game</title><url>http://asherv.com/threes/threemails</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Gracana</author><text>&amp;gt; Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product.&lt;p&gt;That was my initial reaction to that statement as well, but upon reading on I realized that&amp;#x27;s not the point they&amp;#x27;re trying to make. They&amp;#x27;re not saying &amp;quot;respect our efforts,&amp;quot; they&amp;#x27;re saying &amp;quot;we spent a year on designing this to be challenging and replayable,&amp;quot; and they go on to provide evidence for their claims of superiority.</text></item><item><author>smacktoward</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I played Threes, and I liked it. And I feel for these guys having to watch everybody and his brother pile on to the idea they had to work so hard to tease out into reality.&lt;p&gt;But here is some hard truth: none of that matters.&lt;p&gt;Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. All they care about is &lt;i&gt;what you have produced&lt;/i&gt; at the end of all that work. What makes it better or worse is how it stacks up relative to the competition -- even the competition that is shamelessly riffing off your core ideas -- not how much sweat you put into it.&lt;p&gt;And I gotta say, having played 2048, 1024 and Threes (the Android versions, at least), I think of the three of them 1024 stands up the best. It takes the core ideas in Threes and sands them down into a game that is easier to grasp and plays faster, without becoming so simple (a la 2048) that it becomes a game a script can beat. Threes makes you swipe-swipe-swipe after every game to get your score and &amp;quot;sign&amp;quot; it (why do I care about signing it?) before you can play again; 1024 just moves you straight on to the next game. Mobile games need to be simple and streamlined, and 1024 understands that imperative better than Threes does.&lt;p&gt;I say all this to help others understand why I would point to this essay as an example of how &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to respond to a problem like a barrage of cloners. It&amp;#x27;s because this essay sees the world entirely from the developers&amp;#x27; perspective -- look how hard we worked! Look how long we labored! Look how subtle our decisions were! -- which is exactly the wrong angle.&lt;p&gt;You want your communications to speak from the &lt;i&gt;customer&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; perspective, not from your own. Customers don&amp;#x27;t give you brownie points for how hard you worked on something. All they care about is how to get the best product for the best price. So if you put your heart and soul into something, and then someone comes along, tweaks your thing and makes it better, the way to respond isn&amp;#x27;t to ask people to respect how hard you worked; it&amp;#x27;s to look closely at the new thing, &lt;i&gt;understand why people like it better&lt;/i&gt;, and then bring that understanding to your next iteration or your next product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rjvin</author><text>Yeah it&amp;#x27;s more of an insight into the design process than any sort of &amp;#x27;plea&amp;#x27;. It should also be noted that for their previous game, Puzzlejuice, they also released all the emails&amp;#x2F;prototypes&amp;#x2F;images that documented the process, so it&amp;#x27;s likely they would have done the same for Threes even if it hadn&amp;#x27;t been cloned many times over. The response to the clones and rip-offs is just a tacked on part at the beginning because they feel strongly about it.</text></comment>