Why aren't there more turn-based RPGs or tactics games like Advance Wars?

There are. There are thousands of them on the app store with new ones released every week. Some are paid, some are totally free and some have iap. They all just disappear into obscurity.

The problem is the people who play games on mobile devices are not gamers. They are housewives, teachers, politicians. The same people who will watch you play GTA, COD or Skyrim and mutter that they just don't get it.

The truth is on smartphone there is no point trying to make a good game. The only thing that you will earn by designing and developing good original games on mobile is kudos and respect from other developers. As for money forget it the way to go is clones and huge volumes of games that you can knock together in a week.

Flappy Bird inventor releases a new Swing Copters game – and it’s almost impossible

..released only 5 days ago (20 aug), and predictably here come the clones.

I say, who can blame them. Far from being a great equaliser, the Internet seems to have resulted in a situation where a lucky few get _vast_ amounts of coverage, whilst a vast number of others get ignored.

[..]
It doesn't help that places like Google Play don't seem great imo at finding new content, but instead promote the positive-feedback loop where more popular things get more coverage, hence get more popular...

good point

Flappy Bird inventor releases a new Swing Copters game – and it’s almost impossible

..released only 5 days ago (20 aug), and predictably here come the clones.

So the solution is to make your own clones, and release them at the same time as your original game, so you lock down both markets! Mwahahaha!

Actually, come to think of it, isn't that what printer ink manufacturers do? They sell the printer at a loss, then sell the expensive branded ink, and supposedly also sell the cheap off-brand ink cartridges to get a slice of that market also?

Maybe Apple should invest in Samsung.

Venture beat did a write up of the top 10 Grossing Flappy Bird clones and Every one of them had made over a million dollars. The top one was just over 11 million

If you can potentially make that amount of money out of a clone of a viral game and not get any sort of punishment for plagiarism, then there's no reason not to do a clone. It is a sound decision in fact.

I'd like to know in what way that those top-grossing clones were marketed. Did they just use similar keywords and the masses went for them, or did they promote their games heavily etc.

On a related note, the Windows Store is going through some rough times:
http://www.howtogeek.com/194993/the-windows-store-is-a-cesspool-of-scams-why-doesnt-microsoft-care/

Usually brand awareness is created through advertising why a product is better. You'll get a limited number of customers with good taste, but it shouldn't be too hard to supply the same cheap-o product that any second hand company makes (just don't put your quality logo on it).

There's another concept, brand dependency (or addiction), which is when you establish a commodity that relies on you to supply a service for, which is much easier to exploit.

App stores are customers with a dependency. They know zilch about what they bought, there are no history classes that talk about entertainment shortages, and I'm guessing if someone had the money to advertise they wouldn't do it, they'd make their own website.

What people say about cost efficiency is pretty valid. But I'm not really into that.

I see it this way. There's a gold rush, the app store is the destination most are heading for. The games are your boom and bust ghost shanties. It'll run dry if customers become educated. To complete my metaphor you might get your wagon looted by people copying your idea... may the biggest wagon train win (a group of devs competing in these app stores could promote their own type of game and share the profit).

I wonder if the Swing Copters clones came after the Swing Copter release - or after the ridiculous amount of media coverage which came hours after the Swing Copter release. (The Metro? The BBC, Forbes - since when did "guy releases game" become mainstream news... it's part of the problem, imo.)

And if you can be cloned from scratch in 5 days, arguably it's not something worth protecting anyway...

And if you can be cloned from scratch in 5 days, arguably it's not something worth protecting anyway...

Taking credit for someone else's work takes 1 step, but it isn't illegal.

Plagiarism takes only 3 steps.

Forgery takes some complicated skills for physical artwork duplication. Which leads to fraud.

If anyone didn't actually clone from scratch, they plagiarized, forged, traced, or submitted a copy, which is illegal... assuming you aren't distributing it all digitally. In that case you must be some kind of a stingy fat cat who sits in an ivory tower, selling water without a bottle.

Did I miss anything more obvious? edit: oh yeah, no risk no rewards

And if you can be cloned from scratch in 5 days, arguably it's not something worth protecting anyway...

I don't know; I thought 2048 was fairly fun and addictive, despite it being such a "simple" idea. It was simple in execution, and wasn't overly complicated by unnecessary "features". The person who created it, released it for free, but had he decided to charge for it, I'd say it has as much of a right to profit as Plants vs Zombies or Angry Birds. Perhaps even moreso than Angry Birds, so Angry Birds was a reskinning of an existing genre of games, heavily polished and marketed, whereas 2048 was almost 100% original (though descending from the very different feeling sliding puzzles genre).

Just because 2048, or Tetris, can be cloned in 5 days, doesn't make it not worth protecting, culture-wise.

Game developers have been ripping others off ever since I can remember playing games, which doesn't really mean it's okay to make a 100% clone with different graphics, or maybe even graphics from the original.

I don't have a problem with people being inspired by other games and think they can improve them, but I agree that it is disgusting to see people making these 99% clones.

There is a problem though, that as more games are made, coming up with a unique, attractive idea is becoming increasingly difficult.

I wonder if the Swing Copters clones came after the Swing Copter release - or after the ridiculous amount of media coverage which came hours after the Swing Copter release. (The Metro? The BBC, Forbes - since when did "guy releases game" become mainstream news... it's part of the problem, imo.)

And if you can be cloned from scratch in 5 days, arguably it's not something worth protecting anyway...

The point about the disproportionate media attention is a good one. Actually this boils down to the same point about some apps getting large amounts of attention and most apps getting ignored almost completely.

But I don't agree with your second point. Maybe the original Flappy Bird creator spent weeks or even months optimizing the scrolling speed, gap height and bounce upward amount for the best gameplay. In the case of Flappy Bird I doubt it took that long, but in most other games quite some time is spent on experimenting ideas and optimizing/balancing gameplay. Someone making a clone can skip all that research and just look at the end result and copy that.