Copycat or Innovator?

Within a month of launching CryptoKitties, a dozen community-made projects were already up and running on top of it. That kind of audience engagement and collaboration is exactly what we hoped to see for our digital cats. It’s a big part of what excited us about blockchain in the first place. These crafty kittens bring energy, vitality, and fun to the entire community, and we could not love them more.

Now, about seven months later, there are dozens more. Many of them are valuable additions to the KittyVerse (as we’ve dubbed these community contributions to the game) that allow players to interact with their cats in fun and interesting ways. A few, though, are just blatant rip offs trying to make a quick cryptobuck.

The most shameless of these are the numerous copycats of our uncopyable cats, from literal copies that steal our art to spiritual ones whose art is “inspired by” our style (which usually means they swapped out cats for another animal).

We get annoyed when people steal our work. But we love it when people use our work. So what the heck is the difference?

Declawing our Copycats

“The Next Bitcoin…” is a distressingly common headline used to describe our definitely-not-cryptocurrency. But it makes sense: Cryptocurrencies kicked off the blockchain revolution, and most people who are only passingly familiar with blockchain assume cryptocurrencies are the extent of its capabilities. As you’d expect, once Bitcoin took off dozens of imitator cryptocurrencies materialized almost overnight to cash in on the hype.

The same goes for CryptoKitties. Success breeds imitators as surely as a street cat breeds fleas. That’s not always a bad thing (I mean, the fleas are, but you know what we’re saying). In almost anything, the best way to learn is to imitate something, improve on it, and then innovate beyond it.

But most copycats stop at step one.

If someone’s going to copy our product, we’d prefer they do more than just swap out Kitties for pandas. The particularly vexing copies sometimes steal our art assets outright, or pretend to be us as part of a scam.

But we’re not losing sleep over it, because we’re not content to simply rest on our success –- unlike cats, who sleep away a ludicrous chunk of every day. To build CryptoKitties we had to create an entirely new type of token, ERC-721 (unlike a cryptocurrency, ERC-721 is non-fungible and not categorized as a security). We’ve had to overcome numerous obstacles on our own, because nobody had attempted the things we were doing. These imitators are strolling down a path that we blazed step by painful step.

But there’s one key difference between us: we continue to iterate and evolve, improving our product daily with the help of our KittyVerse community. Most imitators are only in it for the short term gains. They quickly slap together a copy, rake in everything they can, and bounce.

From day one we’ve taken the long view. We didn’t fund CryptoKitties with an ICO, but instead used a transparent and sustainable revenue model. We did this because we truly believe in the possibilities of blockchain. We aren’t going anywhere.

Innovators are the cat’s meow

Thankfully, our community feels the same way. We love community projects, and let’s be clear: community isn’t a clever synonym for “not-for-profit.” Blockchain is distributed. It’s an important part of the ecosystem, and one we firmly and enthusiastically support. That’s why we encourage our community’s contributions, especially when they take what we’ve built and innovate on it.

One shining example is KittyHats. They’re wearables for our cats, and they’re adorable. They charge ETH for their wearables and offer an extension that lets users see those wearables when they’re on our website.

KittyHats is great because it makes your cats even cuter (who knew that was even possible?). But its true value, at least to us, is that it further illustrates the potential of blockchain — now your cats can own cryptocollectibles too. They took our core idea and amplified it.

Another favourite is Kitty Races. Users enter their kitty in a race against up to three opponents for a small fee (in ETH). Each Kitty’s speed is calculated by a combination of certain traits, the timing with which it entered the race, and an element of chance. The winner receives the entire entry pot.

Kitty Races shows that digital collectibles won’t just sit on a digital shelf collecting digital dust. They can interact, be played with — if someone can envision a way to play with their cat, they can probably build it. You can try racing your baseball cards, but you’ll be there awhile.

When it comes to why we love these kinds of KittyVerse additions, “Fat Cat” and CryptoKitties co-founder Mack Flavelle said it best: “They leveraged our Kitties and their imagination to build something weird and compelling and fun — that our community loves.”

These are exactly the kinds of projects we want to see. It’s why we’re doubling down on our support for the KittyVerse builders — expect more news about how we plan to do that soon.

So what makes a copycat?

The line between plagiarism and inspiration is tricky. Some cases of copycatting are pretty obvious, while others are way more subtle. To us, the main difference between a rip off and a stand out is this: did they bring anything new to the table? A copycat lifts what we’ve created for their own immediate benefit, looking to gobble a piece of the pie.

An innovator in the KittyVerse, on the other paw, takes what we started and runs with it. They don’t just duplicate, they innovate, inventing new ways to enjoy CryptoKitties and propelling all of us forward in the process.

And that? That’s the kind of ever-expanding KittyVerse we want to live in.