dear zynga

    Not really, though. No matter how you spin it, Blizzard and Valve did not take Everquest and Quake 2 and just dress them up differently. Pedantically distilling everything down to its base components doesn't really mean anything. Creators being inspired by existing products and making better versions of them is good, and historically is how gaming has progressed forwards. Making a duplicate of an existing product doesn’t take us anywhere.

    They're all bad ideas anyway. I mean there's not really any good facebook games lets stop kidding ourselves. It's all sludge for people with way too much time and money and no discerning taste whatsoever.

    Quote from Taylor

    Making a duplicate of an existing product doesn’t take us anywhere.

    The bucket loads of money could prolly take us to the moon.

    Quote from Puddy

    The bucket loads of money could prolly take us to the moon.

    Its not a duplicate and I doubt the major facebook/ios population sees it as that. Gameplay might be exactly the same, or even the frames/scenes, but as long as the art has a totally different (better) style, then sure..

    Also, warcraft is a total dune clone only with different graphics and story.

    Quote from Skjalg

    The bucket loads of money could prolly take us to the moon.

    Its not a duplicate and I doubt the major facebook/ios population sees it as that. Gameplay might be exactly the same, or even the frames/scenes, but as long as the art has a totally different (better) style, then sure..

    Also, warcraft is a total dune clone only with different graphics and story.

    How would you feel if someone literally reproduced Pirates of New Horizons scene-for-scene, with everything in the same place and the gameplay exactly the same? Same plot, same script, same characters, same everything? Except switched to a viking theme and done in CryEngine 3 instead.

    I realise the above is unfeasible and wouldn't happen, but that's exactly what Zynga has been doing on a smaller scale. If that wouldn't disgruntle you a bit, well more power to you I guess.

    Quote from Thrik

    The bucket loads of money could prolly take us to the moon.

    Its not a duplicate and I doubt the major facebook/ios population sees it as that. Gameplay might be exactly the same, or even the frames/scenes, but as long as the art has a totally different (better) style, then sure..

    Also, warcraft is a total dune clone only with different graphics and story.

    How would you feel if someone literally reproduced Pirates of New Horizons scene-for-scene, with everything in the same place and the gameplay exactly the same? Same plot, same script, same characters, same everything? Except switched to a viking theme and done in CryEngine 3 instead.

    I realise the above is unfeasible and wouldn't happen, but that's exactly what Zynga has been doing on a smaller scale. If that wouldn't disgruntle you a bit, well more power to you I guess.

    tbh, i would applaud their efforts and probably play that game just to figure out how they solved some of the problems I had Creating a game is really time consuming, even for Zynga. So for them to clone a game is still a pretty impressive feat. Especially when they do it with such quality in mind.

    I think this guy is totally right; that zynga does rip games off, but they add the +1.

    External Content www.youtube.com
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.
    The reason why this +1 is not as big as the +1 Blizzard gave to the rts genre with warcraft over dune is because its a ios or facebook title which is a very minimalistic game.

    Has anyone actually played Dream Heights and can confirm whether or not Zynga has done the usual 'added value' thing? I can understand that, after all it's what most early RTS games did and the industry is full of such iteration. But the implication was that it's literally a like-for-like remake with some things moved around and use of Zynga's traditional (but not superior) art style, which NimbleBit could easily have done themselves had they used different artists.

    In other words: that this isn't like Zynga's usually admittedly derivative but slightly innovative games, but instead a more shameless rip-off. The fact Zynga's head distanced himself from its development in the interview kind of says a lot.

    Quote from Skjalg

    The bucket loads of money could prolly take us to the moon.

    Its not a duplicate and I doubt the major facebook/ios population sees it as that. Gameplay might be exactly the same, or even the frames/scenes, but as long as the art has a totally different (better) style, then sure..

    Also, warcraft is a total dune clone only with different graphics and story.

    How would you feel if someone literally reproduced Pirates of New Horizons scene-for-scene, with everything in the same place and the gameplay exactly the same? Same plot, same script, same characters, same everything? Except switched to a viking theme and done in CryEngine 3 instead.

    I realise the above is unfeasible and wouldn't happen, but that's exactly what Zynga has been doing on a smaller scale. If that wouldn't disgruntle you a bit, well more power to you I guess.

    tbh, i would applaud their efforts and probably play that game just to figure out how they solved some of the problems I had Creating a game is really time consuming, even for Zynga. So for them to clone a game is still a pretty impressive feat. Especially when they do it with such quality in mind.

    You completely missed his point there. They wouldn't have solved any of your problems, it would be EXACTLY the same game but with different art. Nothing would be solved.

    Quote from Vilham

    ...

    You completely missed his point there. They wouldn't have solved any of your problems, it would be EXACTLY the same game but with different art. Nothing would be solved.

    No I don't think I did. I'm not a native english speaker so it might not read correctly, but what I was trying to say was that I would love to see how they solved some of the problems I have had, that I have already solved (being as in this hypothetical scenario PONH would be completed). PONH is a very complex game (not as complex as many games, but more complex than ios games in general) and no matter how hard they tried to clone our game they would not succeed 100% with every detail and some of their solutions would be different from my solutions. Like camera movement or shader usage, or the movement system for the character. I would most likely run around on all the terrain and see how their character behaves compared to mine, and seeing as this is a 3d thing with physics I'm bound to find stuff that is different.

    You know, I'd look at all the small crazy shit that only game developers really care about. I'd investigate heavily to see if they came up with something better than I did. Mostly to learn, and for the occasional laugh (hopefully).

    But seeing as those ios games are significantly easier to make, and simpler in terms of graphics (2d vs 3d) then I can totally understand that the differences between the games are smaller. But that doesn't mean that they aren't different and that there is nothing to learn. On ios things move a lot faster and the margins between a success and a failure is getting smaller every day, so there the really small shit matters more and more. Which is also why the +1 that zynga added should be learned from and taken into account when trying to create the next game, even if that +1 is really really small. (I mean, at this point it could be just the placement of a row of buttons in a menu, or the hover effect when you click on something, or the sound that something plays etc). Personally, I think that the +1 in this case is the art direction and general cuteness that zynga added. Pixel-art in this day and age, to me, is very hipster. But of course thats just personal opinion.

    Related news...

    http://www.edge-online.com/news/apple-p ... -app-store

    Quote

    Yet Sinelnkov is a special case, making no effort to hide the fact that his games were designed to be confused with more established App Store properties. Luckyanova went on to say that Apple could not reasonably be expected to completely purge its download store of clones.

    Ah ok.. in that case, it's alright.

    lmao

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!

Register Yourself Login