At a previous job, we were building a platform. One of the teams that we were working with was creating a Beat Saber clone and intended to release it on the platform. It was a shameless clone with no meaningful differences, but it would run on our platform, and I guess the idea was that Beat Games, now owned by Facebook, wouldn’t likely ever release Beat Saber on the platform. Still, it would be fun, and the audience for our platform would not just enjoy it, but it would help them.

I talked the higher-ups into killing the project.

Why? Because releasing a clone of an existing game doesn’t just populate our platform with a game that isn’t original, it devalues the entire platform. Yes, Beat Saber is fun. Yes, the clone of Beat Saber was also fun. Yes, there were some minor changes that made it work better with our intended audience. But there were *zero* gameplay changes. There were *zero* significant mechanical changes of any kind.

And if you tolerate this kind of creatively bankrupt project on your platform, you’re saying to creative folks that you don’t care about the integrity of their work, that you don’t have internal creative or ethical standards that define how you work. You tell the creative teams you’re trying to attract that you have no compunction about stealing their creative work and creating something entirely derivative, likely also cannibalizing the market for their original work.

Legal, yes, but ethically bankrupt.

If we believed Beat Saber was the right kind of experience for our platform, it’s *impossible* that Beat Saber, as it existed, with no changes, would be the best possible experience for that audience. Aesthetically, it wasn’t ideal. Mechanically, it was good, but wasn’t ideal, because it wasn’t *designed with the correct goal in mind*. There’s no question that you could make a *better* Beat Saber for the intended audience, but you couldn’t do it by shamelessly ripping off Beat Saber wholesale.

I often tell new game developers to explicitly clone an existing, very simple game that they love, and then change one meaningful part of it and see how that works. It’s a great way to learn the ropes. But that’s a learning exercise – you learn to build by repeating what someone has built. Then you learn to be creative by adding things and changing them. But that’s an *exercise*, and not a cynical cash-grab.

Yes, cloned games are easy and successful. But they come with a cost, and that cost is that people who genuinely value creativity and innovation will be repulsed by that work. If that’s something you’re willing to do, I suppose it’s entirely legal to do so. But you’re telling the world who you are, and the world is listening.

Build original things. Games are too damn hard to make. Life is too damn short. Don’t waste it on derivative bullshit.