How meta is this?!?!
Vlambeer Clone Tycoon is the newest game from Vlambeer. The game is a fun commentary on their continued problem with other developers launching clones of their upcoming games and trying to beat Vlambeer to retail first. In the game you literally read news and e-mails to find out about new games Vlambeer is working on and then steal the idea and develop the game to beat them to market.
Vlambeer being good guy programmers tend to release prototypes of their game to the public to try out which are then cloned and sold on mobile platforms. Cloning is a huge problem that especially hurts indie developers and happens to be the actual business model of Zynga.
You can keep an eye on what players are doing with the game by following @VlambeerCloning, which is live tweeting when players release games ahead of Vlambeer’s titles.
“We want to demonstrate how dismal it is to clone games by letting people experience this activity themselves,’ the duo wrote on the game’s website. “And what could possibly be a better way to experience something outside of your reality than through a game? That is why we have created Vlambeer Clone Tycoon, which is exactly that: a game in which the player assumes the role of a cloner with the single goal of ripping off Vlambeer as hard as possible.”
The idea is genius quite frankly and hopefully it brings some attention to this problem.
