There's no doubt that comments made by Gameloft CEO Michel Guillemot regarding EA Mobile's festive sales on the App Store struck a chord with many developers.

The view is, EA's price cut – which brought some its top releases down to the 99c mark – effectively devalued games on the marketplace in the run up to Christmas, with the situation not helped by the official promo the move was awarded by Apple.

However, while Guillemot's comments echo the views of other studios, Hand Circus founder Simon Oliver believes the Gameloft man was, to an extent, playing politics.

Gagging Gameloft

Speaking to GameIndustry.biz, Oliver – whose studio is behind the Rolando series – claims Gameloft have been just as guilty of such cynical price cuts in the past as EA.

"Gameloft were the original price slashers," said Oliver.

"When the price point started to slip from £9.99 they were the ones that changed prices for games like Let's Golf, which I think went down to £3.99. So that's exactly what they did."

On the Edge

Oliver also took time out to comment on the recent trend of studios allegedly plagiarising ideas from their rivals.

While he called for more innovation from the industry in response, he also said he's wary of handing developers too much power over their titles.

"I think you only need to look at the Tim Langdell case to see what can happen at the other end of the spectrum," he added.

"When people are able to squat on a trademark, to abuse the system to that extent, you can see how it might work if more restrictive controls were implemented.

"There's definitely an ethical responsibility not to completely rip off someone else's work, but I'm very keen to avoid a situation where there's that level of protection so that we don't spawn a thousand Tim Langdells, or when we get the sort of situations which you do in the US with patent trolls sitting on an idea and creating companies to purely exploit intellectual property."

[source: GamesIndustry.biz]