TB on "Attack of the (Game) Clones"

TotalBiscuit, one of my favorite game commenters, put out a video this week on the issues of intellectual property and games. It's a complex subject and can't really be covered in a 15-minute YouTube segment, but I think TB's views are similar to my own and the vid is worth watching.

He notes that IP in games can involve multiple regimes: patent, copyright, and trade dress, which covers elements of physical appearance and is generally compared to trademarks or service marks. I am not enough of a lawyer to know what is covered by trade dress versus design patents - they seem essentially similar to me.

The reader question to which he is responding involves a complaint and suit by the game company Wizards of the Coast against competitor companies Cryptozoic Entertainment and Hex Entertainment. WotC alleges that the game Hex: Shards of Fate, produced by these competitors, is too much a clone of WotC's famous and highly lucrative game Magic the Gathering.

Without getting into the specifics of either game too much, TB argues that there are derivatives and there are clones. The latter are particularly prevalent in the mobile space where a successful game often finds itself facing a dozen nearly identical clones with the serial numbers rubbed off. Larger-scale game cloning is much more rare, though it does happen. On the other hand, games are like many other media forms in that they innovate by evolution. Game mechanics and styles are similar, but new games make changes and twists and try new combinations or new approaches to the same thing. It's not at all clear at what point any given collectible card game is going to wind up being too similar to another.