Hybridwolf said:
Sorry boyo, but your a moron. I have played at least five catapult flash games long before you came onto the market, so your unorigninal. The reason why your able to "innovate" is because frankly, you can afford to. A triple A developer can't because if they fail, then the company will lose out a great deal.
More than that; an indie developer of a developer for an emerging platform HAS to innovate.
A single hobbiest can work on his clone game indefinitely without worries of profit, time limits or receiving market. The vast amount of half finished versions of old or bigger games you can find on the interwebs stands testament to that.
A small company cannot just plug away at any old project; they live or die by the success of their releases
They can't afford to directly compete with a top tier product or give them the time investment to polish such a game and simply making a downmarket version of one would see them lost in the sea of clones.
So they have to make something you can't get anywhere else or find a new way of presenting their clone and hope favourable word of mouth drums up business. Do this well enough and you either become a big company or get bought by one.
At that point you have massive budgets and massive costs. With big costs comes the potential for disaster and with shareholders comes the legal responsibility to keep the business running and another to make profit. Suddenly playing it safe is the only way of guaranteeing you get to do anything. In turn the company slowly stops innovating and has to pull in talent from smaller successful companies for it's 'innovation'.
Rovio? doesn't fit in any of that. Having the ability to realise that catapult games simply lacked a publicity wagon isn't a mark of an innovator but of a businessman (and no it's not luck).
Get the first polished version of something on a new popular platform and you too can make big bucks from a flash game clone, it probably won't happen as you need the vision to see what's going to be big next year and the ability to polish your product in the first place but the sentiment stands. Maybe you could follow it up by bad mouthing your competition for lack of innovation while making a bad turret game and a poor imitation of marble madness too.
Honestly if copying some of the earliest game types out there is the best Rovio can do in its innovation I don't think Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have anything to worry about.
