dear zynga

[Taylor]

Yeah, see this is what I mean. There're plenty of ways you can lay out a bingo game and obviously bingo itself is as old a creation as it gets, but Zynga is just so brazen and shameless about it. It's like when a kid traces a drawing rather than doing it properly. Disgusting IMO.

I'm sure we remember this from a while ago. Emphasis mine:

In light of Zynga's phenomenal rise, one former senior employee recalls arriving at the company eager to discover what new business practices were driving its success in a market where other popular Web 2.0 ventures struggled to make money. What was Zynga's secret? Not long after starting work, he got an answer. It came directly from Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus at a meeting. And it wasn't what he expected.

"I don't fucking want innovation," the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

The former employee, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about his experience at Zynga, said this wasn't just bluster. Indeed, interviews conducted by SF Weekly with several former Zynga workers indicate that the practice of stealing other companies' game ideas — and then using Zynga's market clout to crowd out the games' originators — was business as usual.

[Skjalg]

...

In light of Zynga's phenomenal rise, one former senior employee recalls arriving at the company eager to discover what new business practices were driving its success in a market where other popular Web 2.0 ventures struggled to make money. What was Zynga's secret? Not long after starting work, he got an answer. It came directly from Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus at a meeting. And it wasn't what he expected.

"I don't fucking want innovation," the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

The former employee, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about his experience at Zynga, said this wasn't just bluster. Indeed, interviews conducted by SF Weekly with several former Zynga workers indicate that the practice of stealing other companies' game ideas — and then using Zynga's market clout to crowd out the games' originators — was business as usual.

Let us not forget that this is the practice that Blizzard also uses. They copy other games, but make them so much more awesome in the process. They fix most of the stuff that is wrong with the game they are copying and have earned great success in doing so. A lot of people do this; including Steve Jobs. I am a firm believer that Steve Jobs has never had an original thought in his head, he was just really great at (stealing) tweaking other peoples' ideas to the better.

And imo, I find that zyngas twist on all these games usually makes them look more appealing.

[-HP-]

And now that we're at it.. valve.

[Izuno]

Everything now is derivative. We get it.

Still, what Zynga does just feels sooooo shitty.

[Thrik]

Zynga is probably the most blatant and shameless of all, though. I'm not surprised they can make the original concepts a little better considering they've got millions of dollars and thousands of staff to throw around.

[Taylor]

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.

[Erratic]

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.

[Puddy]

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

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

[Skjalg]

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

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.

[Thrik]

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

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.

[selmitto]

more news

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6 ... yngas_.php

[Izuno]

But wait, there's more!

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/zyng ... nnovation/

[Skjalg]

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

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.

[Skjalg]

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

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.

[Thrik]

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.