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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."
From what I remember, Farm Town had better features than FarmVille (you could actually chat with other players, you could go to other farms, see people there and help harvest their fields). But it was a flakier game, more prone to crashing.
It does lead to an interesting debate regarding what we (the net) consider to be right and acceptable.
Here we have a story of someone seeing someone else doing something and basically saying, "I can do that." Do we get upset when a new pizza restaurant opens up? Or perhaps another excavation company? What makes this worse than some company saying "Hey, I can do that cheaper."
I realize there are issues with respect to intellectual property, but this IS an important point of discussion. When is the line crossed?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Let's not forget all the FOSS clones of proprietary software too.
Actually with these games you are paying the ability to have more entertainment in less time. These "games" are not what I would consider actual games, most could be replaced with progress quest with a "speed-up for $1/minute" button.
Blizzard has certainly had some games that were derivative. Warcraft was in some ways derivative of Dune. And Diablo was essentially just a standard rogue-like game but with better graphics and slightly more options. And there wasn't much that was innovative to WoW. However, some things Blizzard has done have been very noteworthy. Starcraft for example was the first real time strategy game that had very different tech trees and units for each side but was still balanced. And they did that with not just two, but three sides. Warcraft III then did the same thing with even more variation and four sides. And Blizzard has done a fantastic job at pushing the boundaries when it comes to graphics. The comparison beween Blizzard and these people doesn't hold at all.
And I know nothing about Zynga, I just saw this pattern on similar "farming" games on the iPhone.
This is just the natural growth from Mafia wars and Farmville. These games are simplistic games based on a simple mathematical progression formula, and they are designed to make you want to get into the game as often as you can until you can't stand it any more and move on. Then you end up moving onto another game which is similar but then ends up being the exact same game.
When the iPhone came out, two major companies basically had a formula where they created mafia wars clones, then they decided to clone their own games! They made games based on ninjas, racing, spacefaring, transformers ripoffs, westerns, superheroes, etc, but the game was EXACTLY the same, just different names for the weapons, properties and missions. The business model was simple, offer the games for free, get as many people onto the games, offer them free "points" if they spent money on the game, then have them use those points to make themselves ultra powerful faster than us mere mortals who simply wanted to progress with the game normally. Eventually, script kiddies and low level hackers basically tried to get those points for free, because there was a high incentive to do so and the code was relatively simplistic to hack, and you get major hackers running around in the game killing every honest person and making their life hell so all those people move onto a new game... which was just a version of the old game in a new wrapper. Eventually the rich kiddies would come to dominate that game because they had the money, and the script kiddies would come to "0wn" that game too and ruin it and make everyone move on again.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
These types of games are stupid, and are designed to get large payouts from a few stupid rich people who wipe their asses with $100. The games are not meant to be complex, and are meant to be easily copied by the creators, so it's easy for someone else to copy them as well. So it becomes a mad dash for the next shiny means of distracting people and saying "hey if you want to be L337 maybe you should give me $500 for some power pills!" And in order to keep ahead of script kiddies you have to basically perform a refresh of the business model by releasing a new game every now and then that's exactly like the old game but just looks different. So all of this is entirely unsurprising. No one is trying to inject any quality here or distinguish themselves. Doing so would cost more money and this isn't about investment, it's about quick very short term profits. The spammers have branched out and are happy that placed like Facebook and the iPhone have made it so easy to develop and distribute stupid simple games.
Far be it from me to stop these evil people from stealing from the rich, but for the rest of us, to paraphrase WOPR, the only way to win these games is by not playing.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Yeah, go playing Kingdom of Loathing, a FREE pavlovian html game
Balanced is fun when you are playing for a challenge or with friends/people. .INI style file.
On the other hand, I liked one of the Real-Time strat games (forget which one since I'm not at home in front of my library), where they made the stats file a simple
Great idea, and very useful to give me a "leg up" over the computer. Who needs a cheat code or trainer if you can modify the game's rules to let you create an army of unstoppable tanks for relatively little money? :D
Yeah, it wasn't "fair", but it WAS FUN!
Then when I was done I could change the universe rules again and play as the bad guys and trounce the good guys with unstoppable air ships! ;)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Zynga was actually the tipping point for me closing my Facebook account. The privacy issues didn't harm me since I didn't put in any information you couldn't find in a phonebook, but the endless stream of "Alice reamed Bob's mafia in AssWars!" messages killed it for me.
You can patent a game, or get a design patent for the distinctive board design.
Unlike copyright, you have to apply for patent before the infringement. Unlike copyright registration, which costs about $40, patent registration costs a non-trivial sum of money. And unlike copyright, a patent will expire.
I don't see people complaining when the "I can do that cheaper" turns into lower prices for those pizzas, or cars, or processors, or RAM, etc... I thought people liked having AMD to keep Intel's prices in check.
The problem comes when someone says "I can do that" and "I can do that cheaper", but not "I can do that better", and certainly not "I have any obligation to keep doing that cheaper after I've used the first two statements to drive my competitors out of business without so much as a tip of my hat to them". Add in "I can't do that better, but I can use my marketing clout to make everyone ignore my better and/or cheaper competitors", and you wind up with stifled innovation. Smaller pizza shops don't want to bother with the risk of innovation when the larger shop can just yoink whatever ideas they had, not even bother to give them credit*, and run them out of business.
*: I know there are open source/CC licenses which would specifically force the larger company to give credit where credit is due at the very least, which is quite noble and good, but the smaller company would still be forced into a costly, protracted, and not-at-all-painful-to-the-larger-company legal battle to make that happen if the larger company truly is as dishonest as Zynga.
The first time I saw a quickie mart employee scan the back of a scratcher to see if it was a winner, it became clear that the California Lottory wasn't even trying to look legit anymore. I assume that a good portion of the tickets sold are pre scanned by employees and store owners.
J# .NET and be done with it. Continuing..
C#
Oh, hell... let's just say most of
Except that Java wasn't open source at the time and thus none of those are clones of FOSS software? Oh is this ignoring the fact that Java 6 and 7 have blatantly copied features out of C# and .NET?
The rest of what you quote is pretty lame. If that's the best you can do for your claims that proprietary software is "often" a clone of a FOSS product your claims are even more laughable now then they originally looked.
But there is no competition in Farmville... Buying credits gives you no "leg up" on your friends.
I have a bad feeling about this...
The first 3 are probably jabs at being clones of Java but ignoring the fact that Java wasn't open source at the time they were created. The IE7 thing is probably him trying to claim that IE7 ripped off Firefox despite the fact that the features he is going to claim that were ripped off from Firefox were actually first implemented in the proprietary Opera browser. With Sharepoint and ForeFront he is probably going to claim that some FOSS project that 3 people have ever heard of may have implemented similar features and thus this is "M$" cloning them.
You'll notice similar trends in other "Americanized" martial arts diciplins.
Typically "Americanized" systems will have
10 Belts...Black ... 5 Ranks of Black
Whereas more traditional systems will have.
5 Belts...Black ... 10 Ranks of Black
This makes comparing belt colors kind of usless between systems (individual teachers are very different in some systems making them even harder to compare)
Many Dojo's treat Martial Arts as a business, and they realize that
-People like things where they are more frequently rewarded
-Kids are your big profit center
and adapt their training methods to suit.
I'm not sure how you define a traditional system, but out of the five Japanese martial arts disciplines that I have practiced none that I can recall had 5 kyu (colored blets). I would say 6 kyu is the most common, but 10 kyu systems also exist. But you could be right about american dojos treating martial arts as a business rather than an art. In Europe, and as far as I know, Japan, trainers are almost always teaching without any compensation at all. And this includes even the most proficient masters. You teach because it means doing a service to the art -- some even travel to other countries for a few years to establish dojos and try to spread the art. Such efforts are often considered, apart from mental and physical skill, when handing out the higher ranked black belts.
Two reasons why you see a lot of licensed code in Microsoft products:
1. Other companies got wise and treated Microsoft with the appropriate degree of paranoia.
2. Microsoft realized it was often cheaper to write a check than get burned See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
Of course, Microsoft was often just as sharp at negotiating those licensing deals. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars which goes back to the importance of point 1.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
You're forgetting about opportunity cost. Had they put the same amount of money into something useful, it would have provided at least as much employment, plus something useful.
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I dunno about where you're from in the US, but in Hawaii, Oregon and Washington it's always been 10 kyu 10 dan. If you don't understand the basics about the kyu system and you can't make the recognition that an orange belt in one dojo and a yellow belt with a stripe are both 7 kyu... well, the one with the problem might be you, not the martial arts.
I don't know where you got this "5 ranks of black" thing because most martial arts, even americanized ones, still go through the organization in their home country. For example, Taekwondo, wherever I've gone in the US, has sent their black belt application to the Kukkiwon federation in South Korea for review. It's how you get your certification as a black belt, and it comes with a license card.
Maybe you think there's 5 ranks of black because your instructor or your kid's instructor was a 6th degree black belt and couldn't promote any of his students higher than that? Like I said, Washington/Oregon/Hawaii, the places I've lived in the US, all have GREAT martial arts (I've trained in taekwondo, goju-ryu karate, muay thai, wing chun, jujitsu, judo, aikido, and traditional boxing over the past 16 years, in different places in America and abroad--I'm currently at a K1 gym in South Korea). Who knows, though, I could have just got really lucky. But pretty much everyone sticks to the 10 kyu 10 dan system because their reputation among the other schools will be shit if they don't, and reputation means a lot when your business is based on parents enrolling their children in your class.
At the end of the day, who gives a fuck about the belts, though. I teach little kids taekwondo when I travel back to Hawaii for extended periods of time and it's more about the confidence and discipline my school imparts to them than it is their belt color. Give a kid a black belt, for all I care, if it helps him become a successful, confident young man or woman. Teach them how to stand straight, look people in the eye, punch hard, kick to the chest and not to start fights, but be able to end them in one way or another, and yeah, I'd give that kid a black belt. It makes him happy and gives him a sense of accomplishment and encourages him to work hard towards his goals.
If he's not the best fighter, who cares? Some people complain that it gives kids a false sense of confidence, but one of the core parts of the martial arts is to respect other people, and that includes their ability to win against you in a fight, regardless of belt color or training or anything. If they disregard that teaching, well, they might learn the lesson I tried to teach them by getting their ass kicked. If they're that type of kid, I probably won't promote them--but if they're that type of kid, they would have been in that situation with or without a belt.
Hard-working, intelligent, nice young kids, though? I'll give them a black belt any day if they work for it. It's not like people have a great impression of classical arts anyway. I'm not gonna deny a kid that worked hard and has a strong mind a black belt because he can't beat someone in a fight. But they WILL work hard for it. Believe that.
Since no one ever seems to mention it...
FarmVille seems to (I've never played, just watched) rip off of Harvest Moon rather heavily. The main difference is that FarmVille is goal-oriented while Harvest Moon is more Sims-like with little to no pre-defined goals.