“It almost killed the company right there and then,” Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail said over e-mail about another clone of Ridiculous Fishing released by a different publisher, which was called Ninja Fishing. Like Hole.io, it was actually released prior to the original game. As a premium mobile game, Ridiulous Fishing was a big risk for the 3-year-old studio, and the presence of a clone game threatened their success. For months after the clone’s release, Ismail and his colleagues would just stare at their computers “without any spark or enthusiasm.”

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“Independent creators come from a place of passion,” Ismail said, “and nothing will destroy that passion like feeling like you’ve been taken advantage of—and nothing will kill the drive to be creative faster than seeing someone else treat it as a cynical cash-grab.”

Ben Esposito hopes that the care he put into Donut County will win out. “I think a game about a hole in the ground is interesting when the things you put it in are interesting,” said Esposito. At E3, Esposito had told me that he wrote descriptions, in the voice of a raccoon, for an index of every item the hole consumes. “That’s why I spent so long making this game. I wanted to make a game where the world matters, what you put into the hole matters.”

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“I put so much effort into the details,” he said. Of Voodoo.io, he said: “There’s a company where the elevator pitch was good enough. The minimum possible product was good enough. The secret sauce was making sure there’s enough retention and putting money in Instagram ads.”

There isn’t much an indie developer can do when another company publishes a skeleton of their game. In general, U.S. copyright laws don’t apply to pure game mechanics, only the graphics, music, and story. Laws might not be the answer, said Ismail, adding that he doesn’t want a situation in games where, say, jumping is patented.

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But when it comes to platforms like Apple or Google Play, a little more curation could go a long way, Ismail said. “If a clone like this does well on a platform, I feel the platform owes it to the original creator to make the inspirations’ launch as loud as possible.”.

Justin Smith, whose game Desert Golfing is echoed by Voodoo’s Infinite Golf, said that if he “was Apple or Google and I built a wonderful thing like an app store, or built anything, if I built a raft in the ocean, I would keep the assholes off of it.”

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When it’s released this year, Donut County will rely on its charm to lure in players. It’s not a free charm, but it’s one Esposito has been pouring himself into for half a decade. The fact that a company like Voodoo can take part of what makes his game special, push it out for free, advertise it massively, and earn the coveted number one spot on the iOS store, he says, is “discouraging.”

“I looked on the Unity assets store and found exactly the Unity art asset pack they used,” he said. “It’s $20. Anyone can download it and make their own version of Hole.io if they want.”

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“Just putting it out there,” he said, laughing.