Slashdot Mirror
Copying Trumps Creating For FarmVille Creator Zynga
theodp writes "The good news for Zynga is that it scored the cover of SF Weekly. The bad news is that the FarmVillains cover story starts out by describing the secret to the toast-of-Silicon-Valley company's success thusly: 'Steal someone else's game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.' SF Weekly says interviews conducted 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. 'I don't ****ing want innovation,' one ex-employee recalled Pincus saying. 'You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.' Another quipped that 'Zynga's motto is "Do Evil."' Valleywag piles on with an item on the existence of Zynga's underground 'Platinum Purchase Program,' reportedly geared towards making players known as 'whales' part with a minimum of $500 at a time for imaginary credits."
Actually, it's not even copyright violation. You can't copyright a game, only it's art/text/etc. See Monopoly/Scrabble.
You can patent a game, or get a design patent for the distinctive board design. That's why free Scrabble games don't have a board layout identical to the original game.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Whales as slang is a term referring to high rollers at casinos. You know, those people who are willing to part with large quantities of money in one sitting. I imagine that's why they use it to describe their customers.
Casino's refer to high-rollers as whales, I believe that is where the term comes from.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I don't know if it works differently in California from my state, but I worked (briefly) at a gas station and for all lotto tickets we used a separate scanner connected to a modem or network connection or something to validate tickets. Re-scanning a previously scanned winning ticket would just tell you it had already been redeemed.
You can't patent/copyright/etc gameplay mechanics. There were news stories a year or so back about legal action against a popular scrabble rip-off that was popular on facebook. The issue was basically resolved by the devs changing the visuals to not exactly match scrabble, and change their game's name to something that didn't resemble scrabble.
Basically, you can't steal their art or their name, but your game can play exactly the same way.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
http://www.angryflower.com/aposter3.jpg
I can't say how it is down in the States, but I know in Canada the way that scratch tickets work is that they have a bar code on the back, and a serial number hidden under the scratch portion. In order to validate the ticket, the retailer scans the bar code, and then looks for the serial number. The bar code is just a digital representation of the serial number, EXCEPT for the last three digits. The retailer plugs in the last three digits, and then the validator talks to the lotto central server and spits back a result of "Legit win", "Already redeemed" or "Not a Winner".
If Canada does it this way, I'd be surprised if a lot of the US lotto organizations don't either.