Another entrant in the UGC games race

Mashable has an interview up with the folks from Gendai Games who are the developers of Game Salad, another entrant to the drag'n'drop user created games space (e.g. like gamebrix and others).

The main thing that makes this unique compared to other offerings is that it's primarily targeted at Mac and iphone, (including multi-touch & accelerometer support). Mac-only for now, which sounds niche, but is a nice niche to go after, vs the crowded PC space.

On the negative side, from what little text is on the page, it sounds like it's mainly dragging your pix and such onto game templates, vs editing game rules and the like. I could be wrong though.

As an aside, someone needs to define a bunch of terminology for this space. There's a very wide spectrum from GameSalad to GameBrix to Metaplace to XNA. There are a bunch of differences including how much the seatbelts come off for the developer, the business model(s), open-vs-closedness, etc.

The coming tsunami of IP infringement

The "User Generated Content" or specifically "User Generated GAME" space seems to be red-hot these days.

Lots of web-based examples (Metaplace, GameBrix, Silverlight, Atmosphir, etc), and now console games are going to be a hotbed as well, with Little Big Planet being the case example getting the most mindshare.

David Edery had a post up doing his own post-mortem on Scrabulous, in which I commented on it's successor, Wordscraper. In it, I said:

Wordscraper... supports user-definable boards and tile weightings. Which means you can do, as I have done, a board and tile set that exactly match those of Scrabble, and VOILA! IP circumvention via User Generated Content!!!

If they were to publish something like a board-sharing service, the developer (or FB?) would be subject to DMCA takedown notices, but now Hasbro/Mattel has a harder job: Vigilantly watch the forums, send repeated DMCA takedown notices, etc. Also, I don’t know if other countries have similar laws.

There are some holders of game IP that have tried to enforce their hold over game rules, mechanics, etc. Obvious examples are Tetris Corp, who recently were in the news for getting a clone pulled from iTunes, as well as the Hasbro/Mattel Scrabble example. Other cases exist where it seems to have flown under radar (e.g. Webkinz's games are almost ALL rip-offs of classics, but with name changes and theme changes. Sometimes game design changes too)

Quite frankly, I just don't see how the IP holders are going to keep up with it all in this new world.

I suppose you could serve takedown notices to - like Scrabulous - only the most successful examples. But then what does that say for all those would-be infringers out there: Go ahead and clone games and be successful with them... but not TOO successful.