Amongst billions of downloads, how many of the apps on the Apple App Store are borne from stolen ideas?
Look to the left, look to the right.
In a recent series on the tech and culture site, The Verge, a number of copied app concepts have been profiled. It appears that, especially in the realm of mobile gaming apps, it is becoming increasingly common for a great original idea – often made up by a brilliant indie developer – to be cloned. The clone is often backed by a million dollar marketing portfolio from a multinational app publisher.
In his recent blog post, Chris Lam discusses how controlling the simple economic concept of supply can allow a firm to “control” and “manipulate” global demand for diamonds and thus leverage much of its marketing through this. And he’s absolutely right; but controlling the wants of the people by fiddling with supply is really only feasible in monopolized or dominated markets without significant growth. And clearly, this is not the nature of the mobile app market.
So what’s an indie dev to do?
While some have resorted to waiting for Apple to handle the situation, while some have taken the fight to the cloners. All the while, the offenders have essentially “cloned their way to success”. Edge Magazine recently reported how high profile game publisher, Zynga, has done just that.
The end result is an marketplace dominated by the “one-percent developers”. One where dominant companies sell millions of copies of games based on ideas of others. It’s become evident that being the first developer to come up with a great idea is not going to push you up the charts, a multimillion dollar marketing budget will.
Trackbacks