Clones are a temporary phenomenon

One of the former directors of EA said that with an increase in budgets, the mobile games industry will forget about clones. 

Ben Cousins, CEO of Ngmoco Sweden, is confident that the wave of clones now sweeping the mobile app market is a temporary phenomenon that will become a thing of the past as soon as the budgets of games grow. 

“Now there is a situation on the market where it is simply easier and cheaper to develop clones than the original product,” says Cousins, who left the post of CEO of EA Easy Studio last year. “If it were possible to clone Call of Duty within two months of the original release, someone would definitely do it, but it’s too expensive.” 

Zynga, most recently accused of cloning Tiny Tower, according to Cousins, is protected from this. And not at all because she will get ahead of everyone and make someone’s clone herself. It’s all about the budgets that the company spends on development. They allow you to set such a high quality bar, which is impossible or unprofitable to overcome in the case of the development of a related project. 

“It would be quite difficult to clone CastleVille if it came out on smartphones, because of its high resolution, the amount of content in it,” says Cousins. “I think there will be something like natural selection. The more popular and successful these games, genres, and business models become, the more companies that have succeeded in the market will receive and invest more in game development.”    

“There was a lot of junk on the Commodore 64, especially there were a lot of clones of popular arcade games. With the increase in development costs, making clones turned out to be an unviable occupation. The same will happen in the mobile app market. However, not earlier than in a couple of three years,” sums up Cousins.