What do you do when...

What do you do when you discover someone is about to release an identical/better game of the one you have been working on/planning?

I was planning and starting to develop a WW2 pacific Fleet Commander game (like the old 1942 pacific air war). Only to discover: http://www.pacific-storm.net/

Oh well. I wasn't that far into it, so I guess I will shift development over to something else.

Heh... During the last year I've head more games with ideas that I had, but procrastenated, released than any other time in my life. That probably means that I'm running out of original ideas! :-/

Make sure mine is better / sells better than theirs.



Entirely up to you, of course, but if you keep moving on to another game every time someone makes a similar one, you'll never stay put long enough to finish a game.

And if GMX Media are publishing it, it's probably garbage. I can't imagine any serious developers would go with them after their high profile lawsuits for allegedly not paying any of the royalties they owed. Heck, I turned down a deal with them myself for Bowling Babes.

What gabe said.

Win the betamax war. Cut into their market share. Or chanhe it and add something different.

hmm i got a great idea on a stealth shooter.... then splinter cell came out =/

I had a great idea about a yellow head with a big mouth that went around this maze type thing eating little dots... it even had ghosts and fruit and stuff. Then guess what? Yep... they stole my idea and beat me to it.

i dunno... if you are gonna give up on a game because someone else is writing a similar one, then, and don't take this the wrong way now, i would say that chances are that you wouldnt have completed the game anyways, even if there was no other similar game in development...

i mean, all game ideas look great when you first start out on em... it's when you get to the hard parts of the dev cycle that your committment is really gonna be tested... if your idea isn't almost an obsession with you, then you are just excercising and learning stuff...

look at what i'm going up against... Silent Hunter 3 (and soon 4)...

just a thought...

--Mike