I've spent years thinking about a word game.
What started as fascination with the adrenaline of Wordament evolved through the daily ritual of Wordle and the quiet flow of Wordscapes. Along the way, I built thousands of prototypes. Discarded far more. Chased something that felt genuinely new—not a clone of what already works, but an original contribution to a genre I love.
Now, as I prepare to release it, I feel the strange mix of pride and dread that I suspect many indie developers know well.
We live in an extraordinary time for creators. The tools we have today let us build worlds faster than ever before. But that same speed casts a shadow. In an era where AI can analyze mechanics and generate assets in hours, the distance between "inspiration" and "extraction" has collapsed to almost nothing.
I want to propose a framework for thinking about this—not as a manifesto, but as a starting point for conversation.
The "Fair Enough" Standard
No game emerges from nothing. We all build on what came before. But there's a meaningful difference between standing on a giant's shoulders to see further and simply taking what they built.
Consider the history of the merge genre, now worth over $6 billion:
In 2010, Triple Town invented the core logic of combining items on a grid. Four years later, Threes! took that foundation but transformed it—adding a sliding mechanic, mathematical elegance, and distinctive personality. The developers didn't just copy; they iterated. They put in the creative labor to build something recognizably new.
That leap is what I'd call meeting the "Fair Enough" standard. It's the point where a developer can honestly say: I was inspired by what came before, but I've added something of my own.
The Grace Period
Here's the problem: achieving that standard takes time. Sometimes years. But copying the result? That's getting faster every day.
This is where I think we need a cultural grace period—an informal but real understanding that when someone puts in the work to create something genuinely new, they deserve a window to find their audience before the clones arrive.
We saw what happens without it. When Threes! launched in 2014, it was almost immediately overshadowed by 2048—a free, simplified version that flooded app stores before the original team could establish themselves. The creators wrote a heartbreaking postmortem about watching their years of work get absorbed into someone else's viral moment.
In 2014, cloning took weeks. Today, with AI-assisted development, it might take an afternoon.
What We Lose
When I think about what's at stake, it's not really about money—though sustainability matters. It's about what gets lost when we optimize purely for speed.
The years I spent on this word game weren't just about building a product. They were about understanding why certain mechanics feel satisfying, how language and play interact, what makes a daily ritual worth returning to. That understanding lives in the final design, but it's invisible. A clone can copy the surface without ever grasping the reasoning beneath it.
When we allow instant replication to suffocate new ideas at birth, we don't just hurt individual creators. We erode the incentive to do the slow, uncertain work of genuine innovation. We create an ecosystem where the safest path is to wait for someone else to take the risk, then move fast.
I Don't Have All the Answers
I'm not sure what the grace period looks like in practice. Platform policies? Industry norms? Simply a shift in how we talk about these things? I don't know. And I'm genuinely uncertain whether my own game will resonate with anyone—years of work doesn't guarantee I've made something people want.
But I do think the conversation matters. If we're going to celebrate the unprecedented creative tools we now have, we should also grapple with their costs.
So as I prepare to share what I've built, I'm asking for something simple: a little time. Not protection from competition, not immunity from criticism. Just the space to let original work breathe before the algorithm comes for it.
We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. I just hope we can find ways to avoid cutting their legs out from under them.