Cloning Case Files: QCF Design

"THE FAR GREATER IMPACT IS THE SIMPLE IDEA OF THE VIOLATION. THE LACK OF SAFETY."

JANUARY 2010. SOUTH AFRICA

Rodain Joubert, an independent developer, has been playing a game called Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, a punishingly-difficult RPG, for hours on end. It's a huge time sink.

"I was on a holiday and threw all of my time into it," he says. "But as I got to a busy point again, I realized I couldn't dedicate large sections of time to it."

His solution is simple: Make a Dungeon Crawl-style RPG where winning takes just 10 minutes. Desktop Dungeons is born. Over time, it morphs into a strategic puzzle game where careful planning leads to almost-guaranteed success.

"It was inspired by RPGs and thematically it has some of this high fantasy RPG elements," says Joubert. "But as more and more people contend that it's a puzzle game, I've been inclined to agree with them."

As he's coming up with the idea for Desktop Dungeons, Joubert is also involved in an independent gaming community based out of his home country of South Africa. Known as the NAG Forums (short for New Age Gaming), the community has become a hub for the majority of the country's independent game developers. Designers would often post their games on the forums, looking for feedback. Cheap focus testing, basically.

It's through the NAG forums, that Joubert meets Danny Day and Marc Luck. The pair had already formed a game company called QCF Design and had been impressed with Joubert's previous work.

Day and Luck want nothing more than to find a project all three could work on, and after Joubert posts the first version of Desktop Dungeons on the forums, the ideal project is obvious.

"All the forum regulars were just playing the crap out of the game and not making their own," says Day. "Marc and I had just finished a big contract at QCF and we said, ‘Well, we've got some downtime now, do you want to turn this into something bigger?'"

OCTOBER 2010. SOUTH AFRICA

Before League of Epic Heroes launches, QCF learns about the clone.

"He started doing press stuff on the TouchArcade forums," says Day. "There was a TouchArcade forum thread with a gameplay video on it and I saw it and was like, hey, this is Desktop Dungeons! In the gameplay video, he even said, 'For those of you who enjoy Desktop Dungeons.

Day takes to Twitter, exclaiming his dismay over the cloning. Eric Ferraro decides to reach out to QCF via email to help clear the air.

"It was this first email to us which told us we could actually have a case in court," says Day. "In that first email he said that he was only copying up to such-and-such release of the game."

But the team isn't interested in getting litigious right off the bat.

"We wanted to make sure we were rational people about it," says Day. "We didn't want to say, 'Hey, that guy lives in San Francisco, let's go throw him off a bridge.' Which, for a while, you feel like you want to do. Because it's this emotional thing."

Instead, the team takes a softer approach. Day explains how they offer Ferraro game design ideas which would better differentiate the two products.

"We were like, ‘Oh, that's cool. We like that you're making the game, but we're kind of annoyed that it's so close to Desktop Dungeons. So what if you do this? How about this idea? What if you had random combat instead of the determined combat of Desktop Dungeons?'"

The response they get back is a great deal less generous. Ferraro is keeping the game the way it is, saying that there is no legal ground for QCF Design to stop him. And, unfortunately, he might be right.

According to Jas Purewal, a London-based lawer who runs a blog called Gamer/Law, QCF would have a tough time proving copyright infringement.

"People who complain that their games have been cloned don't have much legal recourse," he says. Copyright can protect artwork in a game, or the specific code behind a game, but game mechanics themselves cannot be protected.

NOVEMBER 24, 2010. SAN FRANCISCO.

In a forum post, Ferraro writes: "We can talk all day about philosophical right and wrong, but at the end of the day, it is what it is, and QCF can make of it what they will. Where they see clones and theft, I see opportunities for them to market, 'relaunch'Desktop Dungeons in the public mindshare, and to inform everyone about their upcoming game that people WILL buy, despite my release. I encourage them to think less like lawyers and more like businessman, and take advantage of the unique marketing opportunity that a competitor's game allows."

JANUARY 12, 2011. SAN FRANCISCO

Ferraro's resolve diminishes upon receiving a copyright infringement notice from QCF's lawyer. He removes League of Epic Heroes from the App Store, fearing costly legal expenses. The clone is dead. QCF has won.

Joubert still believes that, despite being targeted and cloned, the team got lucky.

"It's very unrealistic to feel bitter or to continue harboring anger about it," Joubert says. "Whenever I think about this sort of thing, I always contrast us with less lucky companies that have these stories where the cloner did come out on top."

AFTERMATH

Just two months after the removal of League of Epic Heroes from the App Store,Desktop Dungeons went on to win the Excellence in Design award at the 2011 Independent Games Festival. The game has entered beta (accessible to those who pre-order), but the alpha version remains free for all. QCF still plans to bring the game to mobile devices.