Candy Crush Dilemma
Some developers are really angry with King. The company has trademark the word ‘candy’ in the US, so they can eliminate from the mobile stores any videogame with that word in the title.
King say that they are just trying to protect its work., but some people do not buy the King arguments and they blame the company for copyright infringement in the past. One of the angry developers is Albert Ransom. Ransom released his game CandySwipe on November 2010, four months before King launched its popular game.
Scamperghost Pac-avoid comparision
“Their game (and name) closely resembles CandySwipe; so much so that CandySwipe is often ridiculed as a Candy Crush knock off,” says Ransom on GameZebo. “This infringes on OUR registered trademark and good will.”
There is another angry developer with King: Matthew Cox. Cox is thte developer of Scamperghost, a game that looks like Pac-Avoid from King. Actually, Pac-Avoid looks like Scamperghost, because the big company copy the game from the indie developer. Riccardo Zacconi, King’s CEO, admitted that «we should never have published Pac-Avoid».
The Psychology Behind Social Games
In Gamasutra, we found this interesting blog post about the psychology behind social games. It explains how those games attract the players and keep them playing.
Acording to the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, there are 28 psychological needs. The article explain how social games fulfill those needs humans. It is an interesting point of view of the social games and the human interaction with them. It’s worth reading it.
Nintendo and the Smartphones
It seems that Nintendo is finally entering the smartphone bussiness, but it is still not clear how the japanese company will do. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said that there is a small team of developers working on the nintendo’s approach to the mobile world.
Iwata specified: «I have not given any restrictions to the development team, even not ruling out the possibility of making games or using our game characters.»
However, according to the CEO, that doesn’t mean that they will release Mario on smartphones. «It is our intention to release some application on smart devices this year that is capable of attracting consumer attention and communicating the value of our entertainment offerings, so I would encourage you to see how our approach yields results,» he said.
