Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Zynga Memo Justifies Copycat Strategy
bonch writes "After taking heat over allegations of copying hit indie game Tiny Tower, Zynga founder Mark Pincus wrote an internal memo justifying the company's strategy of cloning competing titles, citing the Google search engine and Apple iPod as successful products which weren't first in their markets. Pincus infamously told employees: 'I don't want f*cking innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.'"
Who wants to come up with the next great innovation, when you know damn well that the second you do, some big player with more resources is just going to swoop in and steal it?
This is the kind of thing that copyright and patent laws were SUPPOSED to protect against. But, in reality, copyrights and patents are just something the big boys use as bludgeons against the little guys (and against each other). You think a little indie developer like Nimblebit has the money to hire even a single lawyer to go up against Zynga's *team* of high-priced lawyers? Good luck with that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And Apple.
Someone should start copying all Zynga mobile titles. They already have done the research and figured out what are the best games to copy. You copy their games, make what you think are the best improvements, and reap all the profits. Call it Dream Tower.
And that's why there are vast swathes of laws that basically act as a substitute for ethics. Because companies have none.
The difference between say windows and macOS, and even macOS and xerox, android and IOS, is still they all had unique features to a much larger degree. Zynga tower, quite litterally is a new skin on tiny tower, as farmville is a new skin on farmtown. There is a big difference between taking a general concept and adding features to it, and taking something and slightly sharpening the graphics.
Zynga's field is 'scummy games for retards'. Does it really matter if innovation in that field is stifled?
Perhaps the parasite will kill it's hosts.
I am not an fan of Apple by any means, but you seem to be grossly misinformed. Microsoft stole from Apple, who had permission from Xerox to use the GUI concept.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I assumed management knew what they were doing and approved all the copying. Do we really need leaked memos to prove it?
This is like "Leaked memo from BizCo CEO: We should make money!"
Nothing surprising here. Nothing incriminating
You lost me. The big boy is copying the little guy. The little guy is the creator and has a game on market that the big boy just blantantly ripped off and marketed better to a wider area and with distribution channels the little guy cannot compete with. Removing the copyright would allow the little guy to... copy the game that the big guy copied from him?
I could be missing something, but how is the situation better? Are you proposing that every living human on earth (7 billion little guys aka the population of the earth) will band together to take down the big boy when copyright is gone? Or are you saying that 7 billion people innovating separately will create more value than 3000 people teaming together (# of employees at Zynga)? That's of course assuming that people won't copy off of each other when there is no penalty to do so. I honestly don't think that something like the Pyramids, any building bigger than a hut, most games that require a diverse amount of skills to create, would be made without people teaming together. I'm pretty sure even in this case the game wasn't originally created by just one guy but by a small team of people with different skills coming together to make a better product. Some people are better creators than innovators. And innovators aren't always the greatest creators. And I have rarely seen someone with one of those skills being a great marketer.
Except that Apple didn't actually say that. They'll tell you that they built the best versions of those things, not the first.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Absolutely would not help. Copyrights allow little guys to get into a business. Without copyright, this wouldn't be a leaked memo; it'd be a public memo. There would be no reason for Zynga not to copy indie games if not for copyrights, and they would have the resources to market their product far better than most indie producers will.
Removing patents and copyrights is not the solution to people exploiting a loophole in the patent/copyright system.
Corporation. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
But in honesty, your ranting about nothing. Corporations are treated as juristic personalities by definition.
Once consequence of there being no copyright law would be that the GPL wouldn't have any legal power. The GPL is a copyright license.