Game developers face a pivotal choice when building a new game: innovate or imitate. More often than many would like to admit, they choose imitation. It’s easy to understand why. The allure of copying successful formulas and features is strong. It promises faster development, lower risks, and a ready-made audience — or so it seems. In reality, this tempting shortcut often spirals into a race to the bottom, eroding creativity and market position in the process.
In this article, we’ll show you why copying your competition isn’t enough to succeed, especially today. We’ll examine the problems with imitation and why true innovation, though challenging, remains the key to long-term success in game development.
The Allure of Copying Competitors
In the early days of mobile gaming, copying competition was an easy way to succeed. There was a vast player base, and user acquisition was cheap. While those days are long gone, copying the competition is still a popular strategy. There are entire services dedicated to helping studios copy their competition, like Data.ai/SensorTower. While the practice has become more granular than it once was — on the feature level versus an entire game — the death of inexpensive performance marketing has made the strategy even less effective.
Having said that, while copying competitors is rarely a successful long-term strategy, there can be short term benefits.
Quick Market Entry With Proven Concepts
When you copy successful elements from competitors, you’re essentially using a blueprint that’s already been market-tested. You’re not spending time brainstorming, prototyping, and testing entirely new concepts. Instead, you’re adapting something that already works, allowing you to bring your game to market much faster.
Meeting Immediate Player Expectations
By copying successful elements, you’re ensuring that players will find familiar mechanics, interfaces, or features that they already know how to use and enjoy. This familiarity can lead to quicker adoption and higher initial player satisfaction, as there’s less of a learning curve.
Potentially Lower Development Risks
When you’re creating something entirely new, there’s always the risk that players won’t like it or that it won’t function as intended. By copying proven concepts, you’re reducing these risks. You know that these elements have already been successful with players and that they’re technically feasible to implement. This can lead to smoother development processes, fewer major redesigns, and a lower chance of the project failing entirely.
These benefits can be particularly appealing for smaller studios or those working with limited budgets, as they offer a seemingly safer path to market.
The Hidden Costs of Imitation
While these short-term benefits may seem appealing, they come with significant long-term drawbacks. Let’s examine the hidden costs that make imitation a risky strategy for game developers.
Lack of Differentiation
Without unique features or a distinct identity, your game risks becoming just another forgettable title in an overcrowded field. Players are bombarded with choices. They’re likely to overlook or quickly abandon games that don’t offer something new or compelling. This leads to poor sales, low player retention, and difficulty in building a loyal fan base.
Critically, it creates a downward spiral: weak sales and player engagement make it harder to justify investment in future projects or updates, further eroding your ability to innovate and stand out. Your studio can find itself trapped in a cycle of producing mediocre, uninspired games that fail to capture significant market share or critical acclaim. This path often leads to financial struggles, loss of talent, and in worst-case scenarios, studio closure.
Always Playing Catch-Up
By the time you copy a feature, there’s a good chance your competition has already moved on to the next innovation. This puts you at a perpetual disadvantage in terms of both quality and timing. By the time you’ve implemented a “new” feature, it’s no longer novel to players.
This cycle drains resources, stifles creativity, and demoralizes your team. It’s difficult to build excitement or pride in simply replicating others’ ideas. Over time, this can lead to a talent exodus as creative individuals seek more innovative environments. Financially, you’re likely to see diminishing returns as players gravitate towards the original trendsetters rather than latecomers.
Ultimately, always playing catch-up can relegate your studio to a second-tier status, struggling to maintain relevance in a fast-moving industry where innovation is key to long-term success.
Legal Risks
Blatant copying can lead to copyright infringement issues. You face the threat of lawsuits, which can be extremely costly in terms of legal fees and potential damages. Even if you ultimately win, the process can drain your financial resources and divert attention from game development. Losing such a case could be catastrophic. You may be forced to remove your game from the market and pay substantial damages.
Beyond immediate legal action, your studio’s reputation can suffer significant damage. Being labeled as a copycat while facing public legal disputes can erode trust with players, partners, and investors. This reputational damage can linger long after any legal issues are resolved, making it difficult to attract talent, secure funding, or market future games effectively.
In extreme cases, egregious copying could lead to injunctions that halt your game’s sales or development, killing projects you’ve invested heavily in and jeopardizing your studio’s financial stability and future.
Examples of studios that found themselves in legal jeopardy for copying games are 6waves, which was sued by King, and Vostu, which was sued by Zynga.
Missed Innovation Opportunities
When a studio focuses on copying competitors, it creates an environment that stifles creativity and discourages original thinking. This leads to a cascade of missed opportunities — groundbreaking ideas are left unexplored, unique insights from team members go unutilized, and opportunities to solve unaddressed player needs are overlooked.
By always following rather than leading, a studio forfeits the chance to position itself as a trendsetter in the industry. This impacts not just current projects, but the studio’s long-term market position and reputation. The lack of innovation can also hinder technological progress within the studio, as there’s less incentive to develop new tools or techniques that could provide a competitive edge.
Market Saturation
As similar games flood the market, each new entry typically sees diminishing returns and increased marketing costs to stand out. Price competition intensifies, often reducing profitability. Player churn accelerates as alternatives abound, while player expectations simultaneously rise, making it harder to impress. Innovation becomes more difficult as obvious improvements have been exhausted.
The Path to Sustainable Success
Given these substantial risks and drawbacks, it’s clear that imitation is not a viable long-term strategy for game developers. Instead, let’s explore a more sustainable approach that balances innovation with market understanding.
The most successful games bring something new to the table while still feeling familiar enough to attract players. It’s a delicate balance, but one that’s necessary for long-term success in this industry. Instead of outright copying, the best studios follow three simple principles:
- Understand why certain features or games are successful
- Use that understanding to fuel your own innovations
- Adapt popular elements to fit your unique vision and gameplay
Case Study: Marvel Snap
To illustrate how these principles can be applied in practice, let’s look at a recent success story that exemplifies the power of innovation combined with market understanding: Marvel Snap.
Many of the developers of Marvel Snap previously worked on the game Hearthstone, which is also a popular collectible card game. When they set out to create Marvel Snap, they could have easily copied the core gameplay and mechanics of Hearthstone, and simply overlaid Marvel IP.
Instead, they understood that they couldn’t just copy. They had to innovate. Here’s how they did it:
- Understanding of mobile gaming: The developers recognized the trend towards quick, engaging mobile experiences and designed matches to last only about three minutes, perfect for on-the-go gaming.
- Simplifying without sacrificing depth: They knew that complex card games can be intimidating, so they simplified the gameplay (only 12 cards per deck) while maintaining strategic depth through card interactions and location effects.
- Innovating on risk/reward mechanics: The “snap” feature is a brilliant innovation that adds excitement and strategic depth, inspired by betting mechanics but uniquely implemented.
- Using IP effectively: They understood the appeal of the Marvel universe and integrated it in a way that enhances gameplay rather than just being a cosmetic overlay.
- Adapting the “lane” concept: Many digital card games use lanes, but Marvel Snap innovated with dynamic locations that change each game, adding variety and strategic complexity.
- Modernizing progression systems: They implemented a player-friendly collection system, understanding frustrations with traditional random pack openings in other card games.
- Balancing accessibility and competitiveness: The game is easy to pick up but has enough depth to support competitive play, showing an understanding of different player motivations.
By understanding the core elements of successful card games and gaming trends, Marvel Snap was able to create a unique, innovative experience that stands out in a crowded market.
Conclusion
The path to sustainable success lies in understanding what makes games successful, using that knowledge to fuel innovation, and adapting popular elements to fit a unique vision. Marvel Snap is an excellent example of this approach, demonstrating how a deep understanding of the market, combined with genuine innovation, can create a standout product in a crowded field.
When you set out to create a new game and you’re thinking about copying your competition, ask yourself this: legal issues aside, would you rather be the developers of Marvel Snap, or a game that everyone knows is a blatant knock-off. What will feel worth it? And what has a better shot at sustained financial success?
Innovating isn’t just about creating something new for the sake of novelty, but about solving player needs in fresh, exciting ways. By focusing on innovation, studios can differentiate themselves, build loyal player bases, and position themselves as industry leaders rather than followers.
