I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about mobile gaming again, but it is such an interesting topic for me, so hopefully this interest transfers to the reader. The amount of people who play mobile games is astronomically larger then the community of conventional gamers, so its also nice to hit more bases of the population. Yet, with this astronomical population comes games which mostly contain microscopic differences.

The photo above is proof of this, and was my inspiration to create this article on such short notice. The fact is, many games on mobile stores are imitations of previous successes. King is a great example of this, with their many match 3 games, which all play the same with little change. The many rip-offs of Clash of Clans, Crossy Road, and, most notoriously, the Flappy Bird clones. Now, this may seem like a surprise to some, but, from a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense to recreate apps that have reached major success, instead of creating new, original ideas that may not be, for lack of a better term, approved by the public. What’s more surprising, to me, is the success these games have. Here’s a few examples of these successes:

Supercell (CoC- 100 million downloads) “Inspired”

Clash of Lords 2– 10 million downloads

Lords Mobile– 1 million downloads

Castle Clash: Age of Legends– 50 million downloads

Clash of Spartan– 1 million downloads

Crossy Road (50 million downloads) “Inspired”

Crossy Heroes- 1 million downloads

Crossy Creeper: Smashy Skins– 1 million downloads

Angry Birds (100 million downloads) “Inspired”

Knock Down- 10 million downloads

Angry Frogs- 1 million downloads

Angry Hero- 100 thousand downloads

Additional Cloned Games

Don’t tap the white tiles (highest clone-5 mil)

Subway Surfers (highest clone- 10 mil)

Pou (highest clone- 10 mil)

Fruit Ninja (highest clone- 10 mil)

Hill Climb Racing (highest clone- 10 mil)

I hope you get the point that these clone games are really successful. And I want to state that I do NOT want to be judgmental of these companies, however I can’t stop being critical towards the public for inspiring this behavior from developers. Great, original mobile games never become as popular as these clones for reasons partially unclear to me. I think it has to do with the overall repetitiveness of some greater games, like Angry Birds, and a desire to relive the original experience with a fresh appearance, which is appeased by a game like Angry Frogs. Speaking of Angry Birds, they are, hands down, the greatest at avoiding this problem, with their many recreations of the Angry Birds game.

This practice of taking inspiration from other successful games will still work so long as people still download these clone games. Even Supercell is guilty of this with Hay Day, a Farmville clone. And Farmville, a clone of Happy Farm. Again, I do not want to sound condescending towards the developers, for this is one of the only ways to become successful in the industry. This or paying lots of money for advertisements. Hopefully, this pattern changes in the future, but these changes will be a challenge to implement, especially with the market growing as big as it has.

Thanks for reading. Heres the song. Also, I want to shoutout this mobile game titled The Greedy Cave. Really original for mobile platforms and I don’t believe it is a clone of any mobile game. Check it out, its a lot of fun. And I promise,  no more mobile stuff for a while.

Heres a small gallery of copied games for some good laughs:

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