Zynga Accused of Cloning Hit Indie iPhone Game Tiny Tower

FrankPoole writes "Indie iPhone game developer Nimblebit is accusing social games giant Zynga of ripping off its popular mobile title Tiny Tower. Nimblebit's Ian Marsh got word out about the similarities between Dream Heights and Tiny Tower with an image that's still making the Twitter rounds. The image is made up of screenshots showing how Dream Heights' interface and gameplay mechanics appear strikingly similar to Tiny Tower's."

Comments

Re:Game rules do not underlie copyright

[Pecisk]

Moral rules? Really? For small video games which are made to waste their time and enrich their creators, while giving almost nothing for society in general?

Ideas will get copied. Ideas should be allowed to get copied. That's whole idea of the culture is. There's nothing moral or ambigous about it.

Happens all the time.

[MickLinux]

Let's see... when I was a kid in the days of Apple ][, these neighbors of ours (Stoltzfus family) came up with a graphical programming language.

They showed it to Apple, hoping that Apple would buy. Apple strongly considered it, and then returned it, saying that they weren't interested.

A year later, they came out with Apple Logo, which was immensely popular.

I'm not at all saying it is okay -- but it does happen.

Just to finish the story -- and to explain why I gave the family name, because it is a matter of public record -- about the time I was graduating from college, the same family came up with another killer app. This time, they marketed it themselves. The program was "Rosetta Stone".

No thanks to honest dealing by Apple, but eventually, they did okay.

Oh, by the way, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for Apple on their complaints about being ripped off by Google. I'm all for justice, but I'm not all for piecemeal justice that is selectively good for some parties and not others.