Mobile cloning is completely, insanely out of hand

Flappy Bird developer Dong Nguyen released his new game, Swing Copters, earlier this week - and it has already been cloned dozens of times.

Chekc out the image below, posted on Twitter by GameMob_. The real Swing Copters is in the second row - fourth game along.

The one with the sexy lady in the pic - argh! the one called "Swing Bird", combining both titles - man!

Now, nobody's gonna say Swing Copters is hugely original. It's basically just Flappy Bird turned 90 degrees, and with original graphics rather than riffing off Super Mario Bros. I don't think anybody's gonna pretend that Nguyen invented the genre.

But seriously - there's derivative development, and then there's cloning to make a fast buck off someone else's work by way of consumer confusion.

It's incredible that Apple and Google let this sort of s**t go on. It's a major contributor to the decreasing sustainability of mobile development and the inability of regular users to find decent mobile games amidst the slush.

Copyright and trademark law is riddled with holes and often hurts genuine creators rather than protecting them - and it's clearly not working. It's situations like this that result in King trying to trademark the word "saga", you know? To invoke a cliché, this is why we can't have nice things.