The original post is here.

I think everyone agrees on point #1. If CTRL+C and CTRL+V are ever involved in the process, you are in trouble.

However, points #2 and #3, while of best intentions, are still in extreeeeeemely dangerous territory.

Your cited examples don’t do the issue justice, in my opinion. Metroid took influence from Mario? OK, so they are both sidescrollers with jumping puzzles… but everything else about Mario has been scrapped. In other words, Metroid took one piece of Mario and changed everything else. I wouldn’t consider that “adding”. That is indeed simply taking some inspiration.

If I want to make a game about using portals to go to and from specific areas I don’t have to worry about Valve’s legal team. But if I want to make a game about using portals in a giant laboratory while a crazy AI is watching, that’s different.

No, it’s not. While Valve is famous for having a game set in a giant laboratory with a crazy AI watching, it is impossible for Valve or any other entity to own that concept. You have to get much closer to the source material to be in danger. The AI would have to be female, the main character would have to have the orange prison suit, the starting level would have to be the same tutorial, etc. before it even becomes a remotely possible infringement case. Even then, copyright law protects parody.

Copying and pasting game mechanics from one game to another in my opinion should be frown upon as the offending party isn’t creating a new game, but using someone else’s hard work to profit from.

First off, every human on the planet profits off someone else’s hard work. It’s called standing on the shoulders of giants. Please be careful when throwing that statement around. We should be grateful that we’re not still paying royalties per cycle to whoever invented the first CPU.

Second, aren’t you grateful that it’s legal for us to frown upon such behavior? I think a social solution is far superior to a legal one. Sure, it’s legal to manually copy a game detail for detail, but it’s also legal for the community to smear such copycats and/or create store policies to pull such copycats out of the market. The instant we start seeing laws against such copies, we’ll start seeing opposite laws that forbid negative reviews or anything that would “harm sales”. It’s best left hands off.

If someone takes specific gameplay and/or brands from one platform, and moves it to another without getting consent from the owner.

This stems from a much deeper problem. There has to be some give and take on this one because nothing is more frustrating than requesting a port of a game to a particular platform only to be met with “don’t have the resources” or whatever PR response. Well, it may not be worth the effort to the company, but if it is worth the effort to a group of fans, they have every right to produce it themselves.

That kind of thinking is juvenile in my opinion. There are several Ios games that I saw that looked interesting to play, like the Infinity Blade series. I would like to try one, but I don’t have an Ios device. Because I can’t play it, does that give me the right to make or commission a game in the same exact style to be made on the PC? Hell no.

First off, please type iOS. Seeing ‘Ios’ is confusing and refers to other industry acronyms. ;)

Second, wrong! This goes back to the whole “selling of rights”. The RIAA loves to sell people CD rights and then sue them for activating their MP3 rights without purchasing them. Sorry, but if I have the tech and talent to format-shift my legally purchased content, I will.

Now, to be fair, I know that what you’re talking about: making that illegitimate port and then selling it to everyone. I still think this should be protected activity (short of calling the game Infinity Blade, copying every character/level/etc. but game mechanics are fine). Again, the community is free to either smear it (it’s an unfairly timed unethical clone) or praise it (the original company was being stubborn). As long as code/assets are not copied wholesale, it’s legal.

Cloning is a touchy subject. I understand the frustration experienced by hard-working developers everywhere. (I am one myself.) However, these are largely emotional and not well thought out reactions to the problem.

I don’t even know where to begin with this. I am so frustrated with the state of MMO games as of late. On one hand, we have games like Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) pushing people to play alone. The story feels like it revolves around your character. Now, I’ve lost count of how many people saying they would have preferred a proper Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) 3. If a game is all about me, why do I need to connect to an outside server? Why do I care about other players? Personally, I do not care for PvP, so that leaves me with no reason at all to play with others. The game, while marketed as an MMO, is actually a glorified lobby.

On the other hand, Blizzard made Diablo 3 into a pseudo-MMO. It requires a network connection, even when playing by yourself. Ironically, the only difference between Diablo 3 and SWTOR is that you can see other people running around in SWTOR. Diablo 3 has you explicitly host or join a game instance.

I have a message for anyone and everyone making an MMO: if I cannot affect the world, it’s not an MMO. In other words, yes, Minecraft is ten times the MMO than SWTOR will ever be. The only difference is that server hosting is left up to players in Minecraft. So, sure, there is no Mojang server with 1000+ players. Still, when I enter a Minecraft server with 8 people, my decisions affect the other 7. The decisions of the other 7 affect me. If others want to quest into the underground, they can hand me some gear and allow me to contribute (as opposed to games where we cannot cooperate due to me being level 2 and them being level 50+).

The next great MMO will be one where players want to login because of the world, not the other players. A common concern in MMO design is that there always needs to be something for players to do. All too often, this concern becomes the centric driver of design. The result is a big single-player game where you may observe others doing the same quests you are doing. After all, who wants a game where quests are mutually exclusive? You’d see your quests ending abruptly as someone else in the world already completed them and claimed the rewards! Still, it is amazing how much server infrastructure is maintained so that people can play alone.

The design process must be absolutely miserable. Rather than enhancing the game’s core mechanic, you’d spend all your time trying to fill 50 levels worth of random activities. You know what Minecraft and Ultima Online have in common? They have no levels. There is still personal progression, but it is a natural consequence of time spent in the game, not an artificial score. This “next great MMO” needs to make players want to come affect the world. This does not mean players have to play together (another complaint I’ve heard); they just have to live with other players’ decisions.

Affecting the world is not limited to physically altering the terrain (a la Minecraft). A great MMO could include political turmoil/control between cities. A great MMO could include people working together to mitigate natural disasters. A great MMO could include a single boss with 12 trillion hit points that do not regenerate between fights; so, everyone needs to go do what damage they can.

I want to join MMOs where the world matters. Otherwise, I’ll just play with my friends in instanced games like Torchlight II.