Rambling on Threes! and copyright Koldinium seal of approval™

do you know? the famous 2048 is actually a ripoff of a ripoff of.. Threes! cause i didn’t. i’ve always thought 2048 was original. i have played threes once, but i never got into it, the similarity probably never crossed past meowdy’s mind.

the developers of threes were understandably very salty about this. their official devlog blog post tastes like fried chicken. so is this wired article titled “Design Is Why 2048 Sucks, and Threes Is a Masterpiece”, which tastes like an entire salt lake. 12ft.io link as im not paying for that article.

i mean, it’s understandable. these are good old hardworking honest indie game developers. they do the thing where they brainstorm ideas and iterate on prototypes and stuff, and after 14 hardworking months, they have a polished final product. all that’s left is to sell it for $6 and drown in the praise from reviewers… etc etc… all of that just to have their dreams ruined by 2048.

the past me would probably have been pretty mad at 2048. i used to hate ripoffs with a passion, i used to hate chinese companies’ disregard for copyright, i hated when honest creators get ripped off by soulless companies with a worse version of their vision. i gravitated towards the (largely western) culture where applications are clean and free of enshittification, people care about the original high quality product instead of some cheap ripoff. you shouldn’t play genshin, go buy a switch and play BOTW instead, that kind of attitude.

it’s not like copyright and patents don’t also exist outside the west, it’s more like, outside of rich western countries, people care far more about paying less than originality or fancy advertising. i didn’t realize this at the time, but the culture i liked so much comes from privilege.

that reality sets in once you grow up and start to worry about money. my views on copyright changed in the opposite direction. perhaps to compensate, my views on money and piracy changed in the other direction.

as a kid i didn’t really have a concept of money, so anything that isn’t free isn’t available. thank god for ads so we can get by for free. and the people who actually pay for this shit. nowadays i realize ads aren’t really doing creators any favors. just pick a random trending game on the play store - you’re probably getting some soulless slop whose job is to get you to watch ads. money has to come from somewhere and you get what you pay for. i imagine an ideal world where people are willing to pay for quality software, where the masses could recognize they deserve better than slop, where i paid Wired for the article and encouraged you to pay.

from my outsider’s view, the Apple world, something i’ve previously hated with a passion, embodies that ideal world. people are willing to pay for an overpriced phone, and in return, they get an experience free of bloatware and slop. apple charging developers money on the app store might be unfair, but, it was probably not only necessary, but also not enough. same thing goes with mac apps, it’s normal for one developer to get an idea, make a mac exclusive app, make a fancy website, and then charge $40 for it.

i think it’s hypocritical for child me to hate on Apple (for being overpriced) due to my own economic circumstances, while admiring what they embody. i also think it’s hypocritical to view a free-to-play world positively, when that’s the cause of everything i hated!

my close-minded attitude also prevented me from seeing the effort that were put into imitators that aren’t necessarily mindless ripoffs. even with Genshin’s uncanny similarities to BOTW and gacha mechanics, it has completely different gameplay. and the thing is, gacha systems are designed to be generous for free-to-play players and unreasonable for people who actually wants to pay. the end result is a free-to-play game subsidized by a minority of paying players, which works because most people in the world can’t justify paying 60 freedom dollars for a video game. gameplay wise, it’s also a pretty strong reward system. it’s not an inherently evil system like the kind of people who has never touched a mobile game and feels like they need to call it gambling so that they don’t seem like a loser who would support those weird anime games would suggest, like how i wouldn’t call expensive console games for being inherently evil for being inaccessible to most people on the planet.

but there is a world that doesn’t seem bound by those rules - the open source world, arguably where i’m the closest to. it embodies the naive mindset that it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too. everything is free, subsidized by the life force of the developers and companies from their advertising budgets. and yet, it’s notably actually enshittification resistant. no matter how much you pay Apple, you really don’t know what they are going to do tomorrow, it doesn’t stop their anti-consumer practices.

in an alternate reality without open source, people would call you crazy for suggesting something like that would work. and yes, in our reality, most open source software do kinda suck, but the ones who has succeeded are astonishing. you can focus on the Gimps and Sucklesses, but you’d be ignoring the Blenders and Linuxes.

with open source in mind, copyright - the ownership of things that don’t physically exist - now seems more like a necessary evil that gets in the way of something potentially even better. in a perfect world, the only thing left for copyright to protect is the creator’s pride. with the anti-ai conversation being largely driven by pride, with zero real regard for the actual ethics, i don’t really have a desire to protect anyone’s pride.

all this is to say…. my gut reaction is to threes is, “so pretentious”. it’s a simple mobile game. no matter how much work goes into refining an aluminum ball it’ll never turn into gold. the creator’s reaction are justified, but what about that wired article? i think it reeks of the same kind of close-mindedness i had years ago. there is nothing wrong with 2048 being a simpler and more addicting game. regardless of how popular 2048 is, Threes! is still universally recognized as “the best mobile game that has ever mobile gamed” by reviewers. i think, the most morally superior ideology isn’t between BOTWs and Genshins, but open source. so unless you’re open source you shouldn’t get to act all high and mighty. and you know what? 2048 is open source, so i’m going to call it the morally superior option.