And there are cases where ideas just happen at the same time.

A few years ago, I wrote a puzzle game called Coco Loco. It was an angry birds style "throw the thing at the other thing and collect the things" but with actual puzzles and items you could deform the levels with to solve the puzzles more easily.

I had a free demo out of the first 10 levels, it got good feedback from testers, and I was ready to roll out a version with 50 levels.

Then, another angry birds style "throw the thing at the other thing and collect the things" but with actual puzzles and items you could deform the levels with, called Coco Loco (trademark), got released.

My initial reaction was that they'd taken my name, my level ideas, and put a larger team on it to get the game out.

Of course, they hadn't.

Turns out, we had both come up with very similar ideas, and the exact same name, at the same time.

These things happen. Thankfully, all the puzzle design work I did could be applied to my current project, Spheretic. (http://notnowlewis.com/spheretic/ if anyone's interested!)

There is only one problem when it comes to competition: can you make money without competition?

If you have not figured out how you are going to do this, then moneyed competitors will beat you. If you have figured it out, then my experience shows that you will continue to make money, even if the competition matches you feature-for-feature.

We should probably talk, contact me at ivanca[at]gmail, I'm a Colombian developer living in the bay area (California) who is also passionate about videogames.

obfuscating your email is useless. spam harvesters know all the common methods. just put your email in your profile if you don't want it showing up in threads.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

also, security through obscurity is also a flawed concept to begin with. your obfuscation efforts do absolutely zilch compared to google's gmail team and their spam detection techniques.

But, he didn't put .com. How can they possibly deal with that anomaly?

Seriously, I've wondered what people think they are accomplishing when they write a phone number like 2five5-3seven6-2one1four on a craigslist ad. Bots are going to find it just as easily and humans can read it.

Can you claim a skin viewer for a specific game as your idea though? Skin viewers for various games have probably been around longer than I've been alive