[tritip]

What do you say to people when they accuse you of ripping off "Threes"? Is it true?

[benatkin]

I liked Threes a lot, and I bought it.

It was fun. Later I discovered 2048, and it was also fun, and felt like a bit of a different game to me.

The author's reaction to 2048 rubbed me the wrong way a bit. https://asherv.com/threes/threemails/

Thankfully fans of 2048 pushed back and most decided that it's a simple enough game that you can't really expect there not to be clones, or clones of clones. I like this one: https://mdjorge.github.io/doge2048/

---

Edit: From the post about Threes:

> We do believe imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but ideally the imitation happens after we’ve had time to descend slowly from the peak -- not the moment we plant the flag.

Fair enough. Things moved too fast for that back then and they move even faster now. A coding AI could help create a ripoff.

[ultimafan]

I do feel a bit bad for them. Putting so much work into a project only to have it cloned a week or two after they released it to much bigger fanfare (I'd never even heard of Threes up until this point but everyone I knew was goofing around on 2048 when it came out) has got to be soul crushing.

But at the same time, this should really be a learning lesson to everyone- if your game or idea is simple enough to clone that someone can "rip it off" with a week of effort, you'd better damn well make sure your original excels in something that can't be cloned quite so quickly. Or not spend so much time working on it. Having only played 2048 and seeing how relatively polished and pleasing the presentation of it was for a so-called week of effort, I find it a bit baffling that it took the Threes team a year of work.

[Ringz]

Threes never really left the top 100 charts in the App Store. I think they are fine.

Threes is the much better game IMO - 2048 gets boring after a while. I still play threes after all this time and it’s still satisfying.