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Critics of both the game industry specifically and the cultural industries broadly have long drawn attention to how romantic ideals around creative and passionate work are exploited by cultural firms. Long hours, periods of contingent employment, and expectations of unpaid labour are all justified as the sacrifices that cultural workers make in order to ‘do what they love’. Drawing from interviews with 200 amateur game makers, a range of complex, and sometimes contradictory justifications of self-exploitation are identified. While some game makers speak of ambitions to one day get paid to make games, many others justify keeping their creative work separate from what they do for money as a form of self-emancipation.

This article addresses the tension between inspiration and imitation in game production based on semi-structured interviews with 20 German game professionals. Building on empirical copyright research and game production studies, we look into how game professionals draw the line between illegitimate imitation and accepted inspiration in their daily practice and professional routines. Our findings show that developers disapprove of the wholesale copying of one of a game’s main components – even in the case of the game’s rule set, which is not protected by copyright. However, as soon as a component is slightly adjusted, a complex mix of game features and external circumstances guides their evaluation. In contrast to prevailing copyright debates, though, game professionals reject stricter intellectual property protection, as, from a systemic perspective, they are concerned about innovation and genre development.