If you don't serve the market, there are a lot of people who very quickly will.
I have mixed feelings about this. While they may have mulled over this game for a year, it remains a relatively simple idea and execution (compared to most other mobile apps). Threes has always seemed a little odd to me given that it was endlessly pitched on HN by people who seemed to believe that the authors are owed some debt of gratitude (even before the clones appeared), while endless rich and innovative apps languish on the market. I'm not saying they don't, but the way they were singled out seemed incredibly strange.
There is something in this story about the value of ideas. For years we've heard that ideas are worthless, and execution is everything. In this case the execution was very easily cloned, and such is the case with most games and apps now, and the real novelty was the idea. So where does that leave that equation? Is the idea still worthless because the execution was cloned? Does the idea now have value? Etc.
Some things are only simple in retrospect, like the laws of planetary motion as opposed to the older epicyclical orbit theory.
Three is a great game, but there were gaps in the market. The delayed Android release and the fact it couldn't be played on a desktop certainly left a vacuum others would try to fill.
