MHGames

Warning: this post is mostly a rant, with a bit exaggerated (but not much!) title to boot..

I’ve been meaning to write this one for a couple of months now, but never really found the time and actually got around to do it. So here goes. I started noticing a lot of games on the Android Market with familiar looking icons, and after closer inspection, it’s clear that most of the graphics have been stolen from Jewels. I have not downloaded the games, but I would hazard a guess that the sounds are also taken from Jewels for most of these clones.

Do a quick search for “Jewels” on the Android Market. What do you find? I counted 8 (that’s right, eight!) games that have graphics stolen from my game. Six (6) of those eight games have one of my Jewels graphics as icon image. One clone is the worst offender. It has stolen the graphics, the icon (yes, the actual Jewels-icon a couple of versions back) and get this… even the freaking app description is copied from my game! The best part — and the gist of this entire posting — the game is named Jewels.

Now let’s be realistic: “jewels” is a common word. (All those eight games have the word in their title; most probably there other clones with stolen assets with other names.) It’s not like I invented the word. But why on Earth does Android Market allow two apps (two games, both in the Casual-category) to share the exactly same name? Why? Especially when the copycat app clearly has stolen almost everything from the original app. I mean what the hell? Why couldn’t they check for the app name and prevent duplicate named apps from the Market? I can see them allowing same named apps for different categories, but I don’t understand the current policy at all. (Perhaps that other Jewels has some whitespace characters in its name, I don’t know, but frankly I see no reason why names like “Jewels_“, where _ is a space, should be allowed.)

The Market is also riddled with app spammers, developers (in the lowest possible meaning of the word) that pump out dozens of sub-standard apps and spam them in with different developer accounts. This is of course a whole different issue, and one that doesn’t really matter to me, but it lowers the quality of the marketplace on the whole. I feel that Google should do some cleaning up on the Market, get rid of all the crap — and of the spammed apps using stolen assets (the most obvious cases, at least).

All this “steal assets from a popular game, and name it similarly” is of course to get a share of the attention those popular games receive. I guess I should be flattered that people bother to steal those graphics? Nevertheless, I’m sure that more popular apps have it worse than I do: look at all those wanna-be Angry Birds -games on the Market. Just sad…

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As you can see, I’m not thrilled with the Android Market as it is now, and I shall carefully consider whether to bring my future games to the platform at all. Apple has things far better on the App Store; the control is much tighter, but at least it keeps some of the crap out. And they don’t allow two apps with the same name, something that became clear to me with iJewels. Not to mention I’ve come to like the iOS-platform much more than Android, but that’s a different story..

This stealing assets thing is also one of the reasons why I still haven’t (and never will, it seems) added the music from iJewels to the Android-Jewels. It would be stolen the instant I hit the big ol’ Publish-button on the Market.

(a bit late now, but anyway…)

Happy holidays folks! Here is an appropriate picture of our baby girl, Nella (click to enlarge):

If you’ve visited before, you notice that I’ve completely changed the website theme. The previous theme was completely my own creation and I grew bored of it quicky, so something had to be done..

After a lot of searching I found a couple of interesting themes. Eventually I selected this nice theme called iNove, and this is what you see, with a few tweaks here and there (mostly fonts and the Home-button graphic). I hope you enjoy the new theme, personally I think it is very refreshing — and as a plus the site also works a bit better than it used to from mobile devices.

Yes, this was the big personal event I was talking about earlier.. My wife Annemari gave birth to a little, healthy baby girl on the 3rd of May! That makes me one happy (newbie) dad.  She’s four weeks old soon — doesn’t sound like a long time, but it’s been all new for both of us, so it feels like it’s been much longer already.. Most of my time now revolves around her, as you probably can understand. Learning new things about her every day, it’s nice!

Well, to wrap this post up, here are some pictures of her. The pics are from the oldest to the newest, left to right.

It’s been a while since I first released the Jewels on the Android Market. I suppose it is a good time to look up some statistics, so here you go!

So it’s been a blast, I still cannot understand why it’s been so successfull. Ok, mostly because it’s Bejeweled, but there are loads of other B-clones on the Android Market, so that doesn’t explain it entirely. I guess there just was a (big) niche for a free & polished B-game.

Although some people have complained about the addition of ads — which are only in the main menu and not some distracting blinking colorful banners either, I need to clarify — turned out it really was the best thing to do. I’m not allowed to share any numbers, but it’s been waaay over my lowly expectations..

I’d like to express my gratitude and thanks to all those numerous active players, and of course to the good folk at Google AdSense for making this possible! I had never anticipated it, but turned out that ad supported apps and games are indeed a viable business model.

…and still it’s only the second most popular free game on the Market; I cannot beat that bloody Solitaire for the life of me!