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

marketing..

[ardiri]

Nimblebit just got a tonne of marketing over this - who cares about the ripoff? marketing 101 => success!

Re:marketing..

[jones_supa]

It's so often how these days the winner is the one who has the biggest muscle to shove the product down the people's throats.

Re:marketing..

[ganjadude]

pretty much. I was working for the game dopewars, which was bought out by zynga and reskinned as mafia wars and other clones, pushed to the side, i never even got paid for any of my work (granted i was admin/maintenance not programming but it was for a good 2 years)

long story short, zynga is a parasite, its a bad company that does shady business practices and we can only hope it will be gone in the not so distant future

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Making similar games is perfectly fine. If the basic idea is good, why not have multiple games implement it? Nobody is claiming that every single shooter is a Doom ripoff or that every single strategy game is a Dune ripoff.
Ideas have to be free so they can be used by everyone for everyones benefit.

Re:Game rules do not underlie copyright

[Lumpio-]

Perhaps not, but then again nobody is suing them either. This is more about moral rules than the law.

Intellectual property laws in action

[slasho81]

If you copy a big company, the big company will sue you out of existence.

If you copy a small company, the small company will complain so hard you better watch out!

Re:marketing?!

[TaoPhoenix]

Can we pair stories and see what happens?

X stories down we just had "Your photo infringes on his photo because it contained similar design elements". Now we have "Zynga accused of infringing on Nimblebit's version because it contains similar design bits"? Yet our reactions are *different*?

Why aren't that first photographer happy that the second one "handed over free marketing"?

I think we just stumbled on a new flaw in copyright besides the other famous ones: That there are *different classes* of works, but only one copyight law! So we have the same law handling Red Buses In Photos and Nimblebit Games and Twilight Movies. So the judges are handing down rulings that almost make sense for one class of works, and lead to frightening results in the other classes, with lawyers eating it all for dinner.

SimTower

[rbpOne]

Both games pretty much look like SimTower to me.

Re:GNU/Cloning

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they should have, because they did morally copy it and then gave it away for all of us to share and benefit. This is not what Zynga is doing. Zynga does not care about the community and society, they only care about their own coffers.

Re:Happens all the time.

[msauve]

"Actually Apple did steal a lot of their ideas for the Mac from the Xerox Parc"

If, by "steal," you mean "bought and paid for with pre-IPO stock shares," you're right.

Re:Happens all the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stolen is the kids word for plagiarized. Apple started out doing it, and they still do it today. Just like every other company.

Re:Happens all the time.

[msauve]

You've never seen/used a Xerox Star/Alto, have you, Troll? I have. They were much more like Windows 1.0 than Lisa/Mac.