I do feel a bit bad for them. Putting so much work into a project only to have it cloned a week or two after they released it to much bigger fanfare (I'd never even heard of Threes up until this point but everyone I knew was goofing around on 2048 when it came out) has got to be soul crushing.

But at the same time, this should really be a learning lesson to everyone- if your game or idea is simple enough to clone that someone can "rip it off" with a week of effort, you'd better damn well make sure your original excels in something that can't be cloned quite so quickly. Or not spend so much time working on it. Having only played 2048 and seeing how relatively polished and pleasing the presentation of it was for a so-called week of effort, I find it a bit baffling that it took the Threes team a year of work.