“Ownership is becoming obsolete”: LEX goes free for a day, open sources code forever

“Ownership is dying, as it should since it’s a dinosaur.”

Mere days after Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend’s compulsively playable puzzler Threes came out earlier this year, clones of the game started to appear. Games like 2048 were unabashedly riding the coattails of Threes’ rush of popularity, and themselves spawned a secondary wave of clone clones. Here at PT we made a conscious decision at the time not to cover 2048 and the imitators that joined it in mimicking Threes’ design.

Wohlwend and Vollmer (who had had their games cloned before), bemused by 2048, reacted by posting an open letter that showed the year of work that had gone into Threes and decried the ease with which the clones earned a profit off of their sweat. Reactions online ranged from full-throated support for Wohlwend and Vollmer to dismissive “that’s capitalism” defences of the clones.

Kurt Bieg of Simple Machine has decided to wade into this debate. Actually, he’s not wading — he’s diving in head-first, and throwing his co-workers in, too. Bieg is open-sourcing all of his studio’s games, starting with word game LEX. “We believe ownership is becoming obsolete,” Bieg told me. And if you’re surprised by that sentiment, he was just getting warmed up.

Threes alongside two of its imitators. [Image by the IB Times]

Bieg emailed me earlier this week to tell me that LEX was going open-source today, and that future games from Simple Machine would be as well. This is our way,” he said, “of inspiring young and old people to read, learn, and ultimately manipulate code that came from a studio known for taking chances and innovating puzzle games.”

Given his admittedly avant garde stance on ownership (he cites anti-patent activist Elon Musk as an inspiration) I had asked Bieg specifically what he thought of the Threes cloning affair.

“During that whole time Threes came out, we were disappointed to see how the developers of Threes handled the discussion, only contributing personal emotions, ultimately releasing internal development emails to somehow ‘prove’ that they ‘own’ the idea,” says Bieg. “At that point, I felt like the discussion had already moved on to something much much bigger, only no one else was talking about it. Look at the other side, 2048 creator Gabriel Cirulli innovated the way a game can be consumed by open sourcing [his game]. Philosophically speaking, ownership is dying, as it should since it’s a dinosaur.”

I’m broadly sympathetic to this share-alike commons approach, but people need to be able to eat off the back of their hard work, don’t they? If somebody releases a tweaked version of a game like Threes a week after it launches, I asked, what’s the incentive for a dev to spend so much time working on polishing a game?

“Isn’t what happened to Threes exactly what we dream of when we work on anything for any duration? To create something so unexpected that it captures the attention of millions of people around the world. To incite people to iterate on your idea and imitate it. When a game becomes so huge it creates a new genre. Yet, then to argue that they alone should exclusively own that mechanic so no one else can build on, much like a patent.

“I thought that way up until this year. I understand the mentality, it’s been ingrained in us, to own. But just imagine what would have played out had they embraced the change they themselves sparked and open-sourced the Threes code. Now that would have been something different.”

I’m not sure how far I agree with Kurt Bieg. I think to a great extent, what he’s doing is something that only an already-successful developer can do — like when Radiohead gave away an album for free and just made their money on tour tickets and t-shirts. That’s a completely viable tactic when you’re the biggest band on the planet. It’s less lucrative when you’re playing the Tuesday night gig behind the chicken wire at Bob’s Country Bunker.

But you don’t have to agree with a guy to respect that he’s walking the talk. Simple Machine are putting their money quite unequivocally where their collective mouth is. We’ll be watching.