#36
25th Oct 2017 at 12:23 AM
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Quote: Originally posted by Vertisea
Hello lawsuit, goodbye SuperSolid.
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The thing about video games is that you can copyright them only in name. As much as EA has the monopoly on the life simulator genre, even a blatant ripoff of The Sims is still going to be more than different enough legally. Here's how far the similarities have to go for EA to whip out their lawyers:
Quote:
The complaint includes many side-by-side screenshot comparisons of the two games, showing the obvious similarities. For example, in The Sims, characters can be an Athlete, Creative, Romantic, Socialite, Tycoon or Villain. In The Ville, characters can be a Jock, Artist, Charmer, Partier, Mogul or Scoundrel.
The mimicry even boils down to the exact skin tones you can select for your character. Noting that RGB values result in more than 16 million different colour combinations, EA's complaint says "there is an infinitesimally small chance that the use of the same RGB values for skin tone in The Ville as The Sims Social is mere coincidence."
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And let's not forget that "unpopular" genres, of which the life simulator genre is a prime example, are often plagued by unoriginal gameplay. It's VERY hard to create a truly original concept, ESPECIALLY when there's only one other series to take inspiration from. With something like a city builder, at least you have franchises left and right to be inspired by. You can consider SimCity, Cities XL, ANNO, The Settlers, the City Building franchise, or even Age of Empires or Civ. With life sims it's either The Sims or any one of the other poorly thought out ripoffs.
(And I've spent many afternoons putting together a set of features for a hypothetical Sims game. I'm still not completely done, though I've had some very interesting ideas.)
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