After taking a lot of flak in recent days, someone from outside of King has come to defence of the under-fire developer of Candy Crush Saga (reading this will bring you up to speed).
In comments made on Reddit, PopCap Games co-founder John Vechey posted the following message, stating that he didn't consider King to be cloning PopCap's games, and saying that calling Candy Crush Saga a Bejeweled Clone "would be like calling Half-Life a Quake clone."
I'm one of the PopCap founders, and current General Manager. I'm not going to comment on Pac-Avoid, but many have commented how Candy Crush is a clone of Bejeweled or Papa Pear Saga a clone of Peggle.
King may be a competitor, and clearly both CC and Papa Pear are inspired by Bejeweled and Peggle respectively, but they're not clones.
Candy Crush has added a lot of great mechanics to the match-3 genre, not just the saga metagame but the powerups, and how they change the game as it goes. Calling CC a Bejeweled "clone" would be like calling Half-Life a Quake clone.
Papa Pear Saga was clearly inspired by Peggle, but also did a whole heckuva lot of things differently from the core of Peggle. I think they made it way more luck based by making it more pachinko like, and adding quite a lot of different modes.
They're a competitor, and right now doing quite well, so part of me wants to get on the bandwagon, but unfortunately, I must be candid and honest that they've done a lot of innovative things around mechanics we originally created (which were inspired by other games), and that's not cloning.
Another Reddit user then asked where he considered the line to be between cloning and drawing inspiration: "At PopCap we play lots of games and take inspiration from many sources. Some, like how the Burnout series was a huge inspiration for Peggle (no shit), obviously are far from clones, but some obviously take more inspiration than others."
"For us," he continued, "our bar is always "are we changing the mechanic or adding something significant to the fun?" It's not the most scientific way of looking at it, but we feel we've drawn a line and never crossed it over many game releases over the years."
As mentioned at the beginning of his post, Vechey didn't mention Pac-Avoid, the game at the centre of the cloning scandal (again, reading this article will give you the background details), but his comments will be welcomed by King after many people suggested games like Bubble Witch Saga (Bust-a-Move) and Papa Pear Saga (Peggle) were too similar to the games that inspired them. Obviously PopCap - the studio behind two of the games mentioned in the same breath as King and their titles - don't feel the same way, which will no doubt be a comfort for the under-fire developer.