How Goldman Sach's And Voodoo Plan On Crushing Mobile Indie Game Developers

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Voodoo is stealing indie developers ideas and using their financial muscle "IE 200 million from Goldman" to rip off as many decent game ideas ahead of the original developers ideas. Top it off they steal the idea get it to market sooner and then advertise it heavily drowning out the much smaller indie developer. The model has worked like a charm quickly becoming the one of the largest in sales game publishers in the world off other people ideas.

"Voodoo is a French publishing company founded by Alexandre Yazdi and Laurent Ritter in 2013 with a focus on bringing iOS and Android titles to as many smartphones as possible. This was a time when the App Store was booming, and a few high-profile developers were raking in the dough. Ridiculous Fishing, Device 6, Year Walk, The Room Two, Impossible Road and Badland all came out in 2013, for starters, and Voodoo has been capitalizing on the energized mobile market since with its own titles, including Snake Vs Block, Paper.io, Flappy Dunk and Rolly Vortex."

"Voodoo proudly describes itself as a company that "develops and publishes highly casual mobile games" -- not just casual, but highly so. Today, Voodoo is a ubiquitous name in mobile gaming; it's the No. 1 publisher on the App Store in terms of downloads with more than 150 million monthly active users. Voodoo games generated 300 million downloads in 2017, and that figure is on track to hit 1 billion this year. In May, Goldman Sachs invested $200 million in the publisher."

They will soon have one billion downloads and very likely billions of revenue while dominating Apple app store numbers and billions in revenue off other people's ideas. They call it cloning and making nice with indie developer then cloning their product and making it free cuts them out of a potential revenue stream.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/11/mobile-clones-app-store-google-play-indie-voodoo/
 
If the original developer doesn't reveal his idea before self-publishing his game, or at least the beta, which effectively functions and counts as an official release, these days, then I don't understand how Voodoo steals the idea.

All of the major companies had pushed out Indie developers, or almost any other type of app developer-- corporate or otherwise-- by 2014. At that point something like 50%-70% of the revenue tracked on the Google store was being earned by the top the top 6 or 7 gaming companies on the platform. Something like that. Gameloft, Zynga, Supercell, King, etc.

All of these companies are ripping off game ideas. Everybody does. Mostly they're just mining the PC/console history for ideas, or skinning classic games from that tradition, and porting them to mobile. That's what wins.

My eyes are on Tencent. That is a company that is going to be an American household name within a decade, and probably within the next 3-5 years.
 
Pretty fucked up. Not sure what can be done about it though. How are they finding out about these smaller games before they are even released?
 
This is more of a testament to how weak the mobile application market is. Its heavily flooded with applications that have little to no identity. Development time is insanely short for a established company. Meaning a good idea can be extrapolated, recreated and improved upon in quick succession.


My eyes are on Tencent.

Theyre going to continue trying to hide their influence towards western audiences. Though this WeGame portal is quite scary considering Tencents business practices. People call Steam a monopoly. Tencent forces companies to sell a majority share to them.

Im interested to whats going to happen with PUBG and Fortnite once Tencent release their third BR title in Ring of Elysium.
 
Pretty fucked up. Not sure what can be done about it though. How are they finding out about these smaller games before they are even released?

They make deals with the developer to help them get advertising and publicity they do not realize that they where there to steal your idea and make it seem like they where playing along. By this story going out he will make small developers aware of this scam they are running and be more careful.
 
That kind of behaviour, while shit for solo devs like myself, will possibly kill the early access "problem" that everyone complains about.
 
they can put all the money they want if there game is a soulless pile of crap that wont work
 
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