2048: The Nihilistic Face Of Free To Play

What a strange world the author lives in where someone's free labor of love (which, incidentally, looks and plays very differently than Threes, and was originally released on a whole different platform) is somehow more of a moral offense than the sleazy nickel-and-diming Skinner boxes which pass as mobile games these days.

&gt; What isn’t alright by me is a game that releases for free and makes no attempt to make money,<p>This article is a good candidate for Poe&#x27;s Law.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe&#x27;s_law" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Poe&#x27;s_law</a><p>For the Onion version, I recommend the headline:<p>&quot;The very idea that someone would put out any content for free is appalling,&quot; writes blogger.

I feel this is the slippery slope of intellectual property. People, such as this author, are beginning to believe that carving off different intellectual ideas into individual monopolies is a moral imperative.<p>Copyright is insufficient. The mere idea of tile-moving number game must be protected so the &quot;original&quot; creator gets paid. Regardless of whether the idea is so trivially simple that a programmer can reproduce it as a hobby and feels no need to own it.

Welcome to the future, where being unselfish is considered evil, consumption is the only good, and sharing is a crime.<p>As Franz Kafka wrote, &quot;we live in an age which is so possesed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.&quot;

Ultimately, why should anyone care whether 2048 hurts Threes&#x27; sales? Should developers (or anyone for that matter) have any obligation to consider the impact of their work on someone else&#x27;s product&#x27;s commercial viability?

Well this is sad. I think this sentence sufficiently summarizes the article:<p>&gt; What isn’t alright by me is a game that releases for free and makes no attempt to make money<p>Are you releasing work for free? You&#x27;re an evil nihilist.

Wow, just wow. I&#x27;m not exactly a youngster without life experience about what kinds of sleaze bags people can be, but I&#x27;m still amazed and shocked when I see the liberties such people allow themselves in what they say or write. That a grown, sane person has such a lack of morals to allow oneself to drop to such levels of absurdity and dishonesty to accuse people of <i>nihilism</i> for giving away something valuable for free to all to use and improve is deeply troubling. This is sociopathic behaviour, plain and simple.<p>This is about mere games, and I hate to trivialize serious social events by comparing them to such mundane things, but these kinds of drivel always remind me of McCarthy--Welch exchange in the Senate hearings[0]. &quot;Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?&quot;... What else can you say to such persons... And yet since they don&#x27;t have any sense of decency or shame it doesn&#x27;t bother them when you confront them with their despicable behaviour.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1eA5bUzVjA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=K1eA5bUzVjA</a>

I must be pure evil and morally deprived because I liked 2048 and even worse, I use linux, a free operating system that clearly copied ideas from paid operating systems for the sole purpose of devaluing them

...Did he just say that he&#x27;s totally fine with a big corporation stealing people&#x27;s ideas to make money, but stealing ideas and making them available for free really pisses him off?<p>This is as simultaneously stupid, offensive, and irrelevant as if he&#x27;d said that 2048 was designed by a secret cabal of Jews to devalue the work of honest white men. Why is this on Hacker News? Are we hosting the ramblings of madmen now?

I have heard of Threes only because of 2048, and by extrapolating wildly, I can only conclude that there is no factual basis to it hurting Threes&#x27; sales.

I bought Threes after first hearing about 2048.<p>I like 2048 better but they are very different.

Are we sure this is not a weird &quot;funny&quot; site? The other articles are kind of odd. Also, Threes and 2048 play very different, so I would say the are in the same genre but not a ripoff.

I would have most likely never purchased and played Three&#x27;s if it weren&#x27;t for 2048. I almost never download mobile games, even more rarely do I browse for mobile games. This underscores the importance of giving fair attribution to your inspirations as was done in the case of many 2048 games with a credit to Three&#x27;s. Having said that, I thought Three&#x27;s was terrible and regretted my purchase. Maybe someone can write an article about how paid games are evil for that reason or just not make wild assumptions like these in the first place.

So by this logic is all free and open source software &quot;nihilistic&quot;?

If the author had a reason for why they didn&#x27;t like non-monetised free clones, it wasn&#x27;t clear to me, so I&#x27;m going to make up some possible reasons, so there&#x27;s something substantive to discuss.<p>Monetised free clones still support the market for game developers (i.e. they can have and pay employees).<p>Monetised free clones provide a model other for-profit developers to copy, whereas non-monetised clones can destroy a business model without suggesting an alternative one.<p>Monetised free clones have a motive that he can relate to more, and developers supporting themselves is more worthwhile than whatever motivates developers of non-monetised games.<p>Monetised free clones can have more resources and incentive for creating good games.<p>Monetised free clones do not devalue the game as much as non-monetised free clones, as there&#x27;s still a cost, if not so direct.<p>Competition from free clones in general harms the original developers, but for-profit clone makers are likely to be harder to persuade to stop, let alone by using moral arguments, so its only worth arguing against people who do it for admiration or because it makes them happy, both of which can be reduced by criticising them publicly.<p>That&#x27;s pretty cynical and I&#x27;ve probably got some strawman arguments there, so I don&#x27;t want to attribute them all directly to the author.

Instead of complaining about 2048, how about complaining about this: <a href="http://threesjs.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;threesjs.com&#x2F;</a>

&gt; But it’s also, unfortunately, a low quality knock off of a mobile game called Threes.<p>I recall an HN thread where the author of 2048 claimed to have <i>never heard</i> of Threes until 2048 got popular. His was a clone of [1024](<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1024!/id823499224?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;1024!&#x2F;id823499224?mt=8</a>).

It&#x27;s not entirely obvious how many people playing 2048 would pay to play it, accept an ad-riddled page, or would pay for another game like Threes.<p>I suspect a large part of the popularity stems from the easily hackable JS codebase (which is related to the explosion of 2048 variants)

So creative exploration in programming, having fun, and open source are not only worthless, but damaging, unless monetized? George lives in a sad, sad world.

&gt; It’s like a Beatles cover band in 1965 somehow becoming globally famous and deciding that, not only are they going to screw over John, Paul Ringo and George, they’re not fussed about making money and playing to whole stadiums for me.<p>So, it would be better to be a Beatles cover band, and charge. The real offensive act is giving it away for free.<p>Never mind that 2048 is clearly different enough to three to be considered different.

<i>The problem is that with a game like 2048 around and completely for free, chances are Threes is going to suffer as a result.</i><p>The <i>game</i> appears to be making and playing bizzare iterative clones of 2048 and chances are doesn&#x27;t sound like very good research. People are going out of their way to play all variations of 2048, so if anything I&#x27;d expect any similarity in this situation to drive sales.

Open source vs. Paid product. Classic argument. Is throwing it out there for free unfair to the people who are making a living off of the same product.

Was 2048 actually inspired by threes? OP seems to be pretty sure of that.

Is Threes really better? I thought 2048 is much more fun.

how long after threes came out did 2048 appear?

This is unfair to 2048.<p>First, Threes might sell more because of 2048. Also, the games are different in many core ways. I think people will be inclined to download Threes after they get bored of 2048.<p>Also, casual games aren&#x27;t about mechanics but presentation. (There are plenty of successful games that are shameless knock-offs.) 2048 went viral because of aesthetic intangibles. I would call its aesthetic &quot;Spartan&quot;, but that actually works for a game where you have to think (at least, superficially) about powers of 2.<p>Finally, the fact that 2048 is free-to-play is not a major threat to the integrity of the game industry or the quality of what is produced. The game industry is shitty because most corporate executives are useless, bikeshedding idiots who subtract more value than one could add in several lifetimes, and the game industry is not particularly worse or better than any other in that regard.<p>It&#x27;s not 2048&#x27;s fault and, besides, I doubt that 2048 hurt Threes in the long run.