[Freeciv] Re: ok I'll try it

[Tobias Brox <tobiasb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> And as this argument developed, I have been put off to
> contributing in any way, shape, or form, by opinion / suggestion /
> playtesting of any sort, to the efforts of people who cheat game
> developers out of their paychecks.

Proffesional game development is about stealing ideas, all the way.  We
spend really a lot of working hours here playing games to try to "steal" 
the best of the ideas, and find out what kind of ideas that don't work
very well.  Yes, game idea development is maybe 80% about cloning, merging
and tossing around at existing ideas.  And the idea production is only an
extremely small part (though, of course also the most important part)
of the up to 100.000 working hours that the development of a state of the
art commercial game might require.

We do loose a lot of money if somebody else launches a pretty similar game
to the one we've made right before we do - or, in some cases, right after. 
Particularly the first might spell "disaster" to a small game developer. 
And actually, the power and size of the competitor is more relevant than
the quality of the competing product.  It happens almost all the time in
the industry!  The ripoff for elder titles are minimalistic. 

I'm quite ashamed that my own company have a gaming web site
(http://www.funcom.com/) with (almost?) nothing but clones.  I guess we
can do this mostly because there are no powerful registered owner of those
ideas.

One of the differences between freeciv and commercial games is that the
freeciv development have a stated target of achieving
"civII-compatibility", and that it doesn't claim to be anything else than
a free civilization clone.  Maybe that's something that should be altered
a bit.  I agree that aiming towards civII compatibility is a good idea
because it might keep us focused and because it actually works, but it
might be smart to rewrite it a bit ... "improvement over" sounds a lot
better than "a clone of". 

Speaking for myself, not for my company, as always.  As for freeciv, it's
just one of my favorite games, though I haven't had much time for playing
it recently.

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