Clash of Clans Clone

Hi all,

I’d really appreciate some feedback on my game plan over the next few months.

As many people know Clash of Clans and its various clones out there make a lot of money for the bigger companies that produce them (and pour money into their marketing efforts).

It’s not trivial to create a real time strategy game for mobile (or any platform for that matter). As such, this puts game development in this genre out of reach for many indie devs trying to make a living.

However, as a Unity developer - I have purchased this asset a few weeks ago and have come up with a development plan that would take roughly 2 months to implement.

My question is this: For me, I run quite lean and 2 months is a lot of time to invest into a project. Is it worth taking a punt? People I have spoken to so far have 2 schools of thought:

  1. There is so much competition in this genre that any attempt to compete with the bigger companies is futile - and upon releasing your “Clash of Clans” clone to the app store it will instantly go to the bottom of the heap, you will get minimal downloads and no ROI.

  2. Competition is tough in this category, but the market isn’t flooded. It takes time and effort to make a good RTS game and as such there is still market space for people who come up with a good “clone” with a new and exciting theme. You may not get rich quick but if you put a good quality RTS game to google play you could potentially do much better than, say, yet another candy crush clone and may attract users looking for an alternative to Clash of Clans.

Thoughts? As I said - I’d really appreciate any feedback you have to offer. Is it a good idea? Do you think it will instantly fail? :confused:

Thanks,
Simon

Hi Simon,

If you have dev resources, and time to dedicate to this project, then by all means you have to try it.

I agree on the 2nd point, there is competition but its mostly garbage. I think where people cut a lot of corners, there is opportunity and money to be made. Serious RTS games are one of those things, the devs either run out of cash, or just start cutting corners in the sake of releasing the game, and then you end up with the current situation.

One thing I would focus on is longevity of the game, something I have struggled with myself… its very easy to overlook this part and focus too much on the initial release. Once you get players started, they might finish your game in a week and leave. When players leave, you fail as a developer. Then you are back to step 1, developing more levels and paying enormous money to acquire players.

Also, I have a “times 3” theory. Whatever you think will take 2 months to make, it will probably take 6 months to make it right.

Have that in mind when you take on any new project.

apps like this are terrible ideas because there is no source of credible, verifiable content. unless you have thousands of users feeding you that data, you will fail.

It seems like there are a lot of RTS’s for mobile devices these days, so it seems like that market could be saturated. I have no idea what your ROI would be on this project, but I would suspect you would have a pretty tough road in this market. What really sticks out for me (and I speak strictly as a gamer) is if there is something unique about the game that will keep me playing over the long term. I want to be able to get my money’s worth.