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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."
But... but... it's not stealing. It's copyright violation. You can't steal from somebody if they still have the original copy. (close captioning for the sarcasm impaired, that was sarcasm.).
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.
Screw Zynga. People need to immediately stop playing these money-draining pavlovian flash games
Okay, I'm sad to say I've given more of my time then I'd like to Facebook games. I'm also happy to say that I've managed to reform myself. Finally broke myself free (and am in the process of "de-friending" people who I friended just for the player boost).
This shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone. Lots of games in arcades ripped off competitors. The only difference with Zynga is that its much more visible to people.
Heck, between the limited game mechanics available, they actually only have one or two games, with LOTS of reskinning between different flavors of them. Hopefully this will encourage more innovation but the sad fact is, that it will only discourage innovation, since if you DO come up with something fun and innovative, there is the concern that someone like Zynga will come along and just rip it off lock/stock/barrel, so why bother?
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I understand them not wanting to go through the hassle of wire transfers for everyone, that's where the ease of credit cards come in. I think it's good of them to offer this fee avoiding method to big time users. They're obviously passing the savings back onto the user in the form of bonus. As for the complaints about wasting money... how much do you pay for cable tv every month? At least these games are social and interactive. I don't play any zynga games myself but do play some free MMO's and pay-to-play MMO's as well and have no problem spending money on things I enjoy. And no.. I do not pay for cable tv, and only use my tv set for netflix and console.
Zynga sounds like an evil name to me. Darth Zynga, Lord Zynga, Master Zynga all sound like good villain names to me.
my wife used to buy the scratch off tickets and once in a while i used to take the winning ones to the store to cash them out. i noticed that they scan the bar code to verify a winning ticket. and most of the people i see buying them scratch them off with hope and dreams.
farmville is not that different than most RPGs except its freemium. most RPG's the game play is very repetitive with minor rewards along the way. farmville is free to start and you pay if you want the rewards faster.
I think this idea started with Napoleon and his practice of giving soldiers ribbons for bravery in battle. people would risk their lives for a colored piece of cloth
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?
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Let's not forget all the FOSS clones of proprietary software too.
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.
They sound more like cows to me - prime for the milking.
I don't understand the people railing against Facebook-based or other games because of the so-called issue of paying real money for in-game credits. People put in real quarters to play a video games at the arcade, they subscribe to World of Warcraft and other MMORGs.
You're not paying for credits, you're paying for entertainment provided by the game.
> Let's not forget all the FOSS clones of proprietary software too.
Nearly all of those proprietary apps are themselves clones.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
this goes back years. Microsoft used to do the same thing. they would visit a company, see a product, decline to buy it and then it would come up in the next version of WIndows. lately i see that Windows has a lot of third party licensed software. Apple is buying up small companies and last week there was news how Apple stopped doing business with a design firm that showed off an ipad lookalike. apple pays others to design products or parts of them.
big companies with herds of MBA's take years to do anything and then it's so bad no one wants to use it. a few guys in a garage always innovate. look at YouTube, Facebook and all the current big names. AOL had a video service years ago and they used the actor from married with children to advertise it on TV. shockingly it died.
Zygna's business model, as the article says, is to just copy a game and then add a whole lot of "spam your friends" features. Unfortunatly, like AOL disks before them, this works and they've got the largest base of gamers on Facebook. The absolute worst part is that other companies saw the success of the "spam like hell and don't worry about the consequences" business model and immediately followed suit, so that all games on Facebook feel the need to post 4 or 5 messages a day to your wall/friends wall/friends messages/email/sms/friends email/etc...
Even big names like EA got into the game. They bought up Playfish earlier and immediately started adding as many "spam your friends" features as they could think of to all of the PF games. Worse, as Facebook adds features to block (automatically or manually) said spam messages, the companies work as fast as possible to get around the blocks. Right now I have half a dozen posts from some damn fugly animal breeding game or something that make it through because they're posted as pictures in the account or something.
Also, if you want to see what unbridled evil look like, pull up any of those games and check out the "free cash offers", which look like an inbox without a spam filter. "Sign up for an UzbeckBank Credit Card and get 100 fake "real money" coins!". Fill out this fake survey with tons of personal information for 10 coins. etc...
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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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?
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.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Nearly all of those proprietary apps are themselves clones.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
But three copylefts do.
Not the point at all. If A claims B ripped him off and sues him - and loses - that sets a precedent that can be used when B sues C, C sues D etc.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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! ;)
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You know there is nothing original in Star Wars, or in Avatar? It's all recycled material lifted from earlier, less rich&famous sources.
It's the same for inventions, the guy who ends up with the patent isn't necessarily the guy who innovated.
You can't take the sky from me...
So it's unethical to copy a decent unpatented idea that's been ineptly marketed and turn it into a titan of the industry? I disagree. If they were so concerned, they could have applied for a design patent or a trademark. Problem is: there are already farming games out there in the world. FarmTown is just as derivative as Farmville, just marketed and developed poorly. Simply moving the farming game paradigm to a social network hardly counts as innovation worthy of protection, IMO.
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Nearly all of those proprietary apps are themselves clones.
...often of what was originally FOSS software. How's that for a vicious circle?
Further, they often even derived from the same source code ...until the GPL became a popular way to prevent that.
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.
There is a difference between:
To use an example from a more standard game (which I don't play at all mind you), how much fun would poker be if you got dealt 5 cards, but if you wanted to pay $15 more you could get a 6th card that other players didn't have? It would unbalance the game, and everyone who wanted to compete would be forced to also buy extra cards to keep the balance up. Only the rich would play and the real winner would be the house, selling off the extra cards. That is the model many MMO game companies want us to accept. Sadly there are a lot of players who see the fact that they have cash on hand as justification for their lack of sportsmanship and willingness to get ahead of other players who are better, by buying the edge required.
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Hundreds of thousands of people hunched in front of glowing monitors, clicking their mice and banging their keyboards. Not one of them actually talking to each other, just posting game-generated messages about game progress, wishlists, and canned in-game requests.
Where is the "social" aspect of such games? Even FPS games with voice headsets are more "social" because they allow/encourage the players to yell at each other!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Doesn't it sound pretty close to following the Microsoft business techniques?
It should. It's called being a second mover. Being first to market with something sometimes provides a market advantage but often being second is more valuable because you can learn from the mistakes of the other guy. Furthermore you don't have the risk and expense of discovering or establishing a marketplace for the product. It's basically a part of the free rider problem. Being a second mover carries risks (you might not be able to follow fast or well enough) but it is a time tested and successful business strategy.
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.
Open source software clones other software constantly. You even have the classic taskbar, start menu, "File Edit View Window Help" menus, and more. Why is it wrong for Zynga to do this?
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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