Mihara hates clones because if people can play clones for free, there's no sale in TGM games. Don't expect his opinions to be rational or justified though. I'm pretty sure he's gonna hate on your clone no matter what you do to make it different.
Aaaaaaaaaand what if I end up with something worked enough so I could sell it for ynow, like 10-15 bucks like a lot other indies on steam, would that make it better cause it's not free or am I thinking backwards again?
i don't see how that would make it any better you're literally making profit out of someone else's intellectual property
I wouldn't be against giving Arika a part of the profit if they asked for it. But I mean it's still better that completely stealing the game plus giving it for free IMO. But yeah I'm probably thinking weird anyways. Derp.
tetris isn't arika's property, it's TTC's. you're pissing off two companies at once if you use anything arika did (grading and ARS are copyrighted). giving arika part of the profit is not how it works. arika can't make tgm4 and just "give TTC a part of the profit", they have to get the license and get the approval of the game to be made then have it looked over by TTC to make sure it conforms to the guideline well enough, among other things. i really don't see how selling it is better than giving it for free. if you make your own version of something copyrighted and/or patented then sell it off, you are violating copyright laws. simple as that. if you distribute it for free then a) you aren't potentially stealing profit from the real thing and b) you are basically providing free advertisement for the real product.
Oh I see... Well, Thanks for making it clear, you're avoiding me a lot of troubles my dumbness would have got me into. I really need to actually think for a second about how it works before doing something.
TTC have shown time and again that if it's commercialised and bears more than just a passing resemblance to Tetris, then they'll try and sue you. There are certain things they will come down extra hard on you for, such as naming it something ending in -tris, or ripping of the guideline rotation and colours exactly, but they seem pretty happy to nuke any Tetris knock-off that's being sold for-profit and getting any traction anywhere. Either be prepared to fight a lawsuit if you're just skipping out on following the guideline (or any other ruleset for an official game probably), or be prepared to change the core game so drastically that it stops recognisably being Tetris in most respects. DTET isn't a TGM clone at all, so there'd be no reason for Mihara to have a problem with it. Not apparently. They did. Myself and numerous others lost videos and entire YouTube accounts to take-down requests from Arika Corporation I strongly doubt they'd have been leaned on by TTC, just because TTC easily own the legal rights to take down videos themselves if they actually gave a shit. And because it was almost exclusively TGM clones that got massacred on YouTube (Heboris, Texmaster and LockJaw with TGM colours) - videos of other fan-made games like Cultris and Quadra were completely unharmed. TTC hasn't done anything directly against TGM clones *ever*, as far as I know. Blockbox is arguably an exception, but that had guideline modes as well and importantly was commercialised and part of a site with quite a decent amount of traffic. TTC doesn't tend to touch the games that communities like us care about, because they're pretty much all not for profit, and fundamentally they're incredibly niche. It would probably cost TTC more in bad publicity from us kicking up a huge fuss if they took them down, than they'd ever lose from a couple of hundred people not playing on official platforms (which a lot of us still tend to do anyway). As a technical point, you infringe copyright laws exactly the same whether you distribute it for profit or for free. It's just that commercial entities are typically more of a threat, and it's also usually easier to track down exactly whose door your lawyers need to be knocking on when there's a money trail. And really, companies don't give a shit whether you're grabbing their profit or not, just that they're not getting it. If you make a company lose 1000 sales by copying something and distributing it yourself, then they've lost that revenue whether you've profited or not.
TTC is well aware hat there are a number of people who like TGM. Someone outside of Japan getting GM on TI was a big eye opener. this said "Hey, people outside of Japan can do this!" That really started up the buzz that caused the series to be revived again. Arika has the rather unique position of having an Authentic Tetris Game that bucks not only the current guideline, but rotation in ALL OTHER authentic tetris games, since sega tetris has never been authentic until it's re-release as part of tetris collection. Here's the reference https://tetrisconcept.net/threads/another-new-arika-video-tgm3.1066/page-2 Back then it seems Mihara was a lot more laid back about the clones and didn't want to rock the boat, since he was well aware he took from sega tetris, shimizus tetris, and even G Tet. But TTC forced the issue and told Arika that they would be fined if they didn't take action. If i'm reading it right this is what his hatred of clones is from.
Since I don't think it has been mentioned directly on the forums/wiki, the arcade version of 1999 Sega Tetris has an operator's menu setting for piece colors, Sega or BPS. The BPS colors are some wonky pre-Guideline scheme, similar to but not matching The New Tetris. That seems pretty damn compliant with whatever specifications BPS/TTC had at the time.
I was referring to the game nearly everyone else means when they say sega tetris, which is the 1988 version, which was effectively retroactively granted official status when it was included in Sega ages 2500 tetris collection. wow. that's VERY fine print on that 1999 title screen. The listed elorg (academysoft) copyright date does appear to affirm that their original arcade license which came from elorg to mirrorsoft to tengen to them was recognized as valid at that time, since TTC wouldn't let them put it if it wasn't. but note that neither mirrorsoft nor tengen are mentioned on sega tetris 1999. So i think i was correct in my classification on that version of tetris.
