Zynga Sues EA For 'Anti-competitive' Practices

An anonymous reader writes "In early August, Electronic Arts sued Zynga for allegedly copying EA's Sims Social game. Zynga has now launched a counterattack, suing EA for 'anticompetitive and unlawful business practices, including legal threats and demands for no-hire agreements.' The company also accuses EA of copying a Zynga game called YoVille. Zynga has also demanded a jury trial to settle EA's claims."

Comments

Zynga hahahahah

[TheRecklessWanderer]

We are using you for being mad at us for copying your product. Take that good company!

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[hairyfeet]

You gotta give Zynga credit though, it takes some VERY large brass balls to basically say "We stole your product and now we are gonna sue you....because you won't let us steal more of your products."

Which is why I can't see how ANYBODY can defend Zynga in this case. Is EA run by douchebags? Yes it is, and thanks to their douchebaggy ways EA is now up for sale, showing that refusing to buy from companies that treat you like shit works, even if it takes awhile.

But with Zynga the ONLY reason you haven't heard of this before is they were stealing from the little devs that couldn't fight back. Look up any of their games, going back to the very first ones like Farmville and you'll find an indie dev that had put out the EXACT SAME GAME one to two years before, and I mean the EXACT same game, Zynga doesn't bother to change shit but the name!

We don't let ANY other artform do this, I can't put out my own version of "Lord Of The Rings" with every character and word of dialog and simply rename it "Lord Of The Bracelets" and not get my ass sued off, I can't hire studio musicians to knock off the songs on the top 10 and simply change the title and put out my own top ten mega mix albums, so why in the fuck should Zynga be allowed to steal every damned thing, from the characters to the art style to the fricking UIs, slap a new name on it and then sell it?

If you can't see how this is seriously bad for indies then you are blind. if Zynga gets away with this why should I buy "Plants VS Zombies" when some corp will hire a bunch of Chinese coders and I can have "Shrubs VS The Undead" next week for free on FB? Why buy Minecraft when I can have MineBuilder for free? One of the great things that has come along is the way the Internet allows small artists to compete and sell their wares no different than the big guys, but if this kind of shit isn't stopped when it comes to games they won't have a prayer, either they work for the megacorps who have enough money to sue, or everything they do will be taken from them. That is frankly a shitty choice and as much as I don't care for EA they are 100% in the right on this one and I hope they crush Zynga like the bugs that they are, go EA!

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[phantomfive]

It's one of those situations where you wish BOTH could lose.

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[Anonymous Coward]

Gameplay mechanics can not be copyrighted.

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[vux984]

How close were Zynga's copies

Pretty close to adding a mustache to the mona lisa and calling it an original work of art.

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[hairyfeet]

Dude, look up "Zynga rips off indie" in the search engine of your choice and be ready to shit brick, because as another poster put it "Its like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa and calling it an original artwork". Look up "The Farm" I believe it was called and compare it to farmville, hell pick ANY game they have and look up its name and "ripoff" and you'll find that some little indie had put out a game one to two years before and once it started gaining a few users? here comes Zynga and a pile of their Chinese coders to bold face rip it off!

Hell look up the EA court papers man, they have in it side by side photos, they fucking stole EVERYTHING. The characters, their animations, the thought bubble, the UI, the sound, they might as well have just took EA's code and stuck their name on it, it's THAT blatant.

Look, I got NO problem with taking a basic idea and making your own take, look at how we have a bazillion tower defense games, Good God half the FPS games out there are so generic war themed you could place them side by side and it looks like "Generic action movie #47" but that is NOT what we have here, they did NOT put out their own take, what they did is more like taking tracing paper and just ripping it off frame by frame!

Please look it up for yourself Bob, I know how you feel. When I first heard of this I thought "So they both have Sims style games, so what?" but holy shit, they didn't even fricking pretend to have an original thought, it was a pixel to pixel copy. I'm not shitting you either, one of the EA guys actually took measurements and more than 3/4th of the artwork is even pixel by pixel sized so damned identically you could mix and match between the two games and nobody would notice! I'm sure after you see the pics, especially of the little indie guys that could afford to fight back, that Zynga deserves to die and EA deserves to win, this is just pure theft, no bones about it.

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[Internetuser1248]

And like last time there was a zynga vs EA story I will say it again: I hope they both bankrupt each other. I hate lawyers too but if they are going to be ripping someone off, please let it be both Zynga and EA at the same time. Burn baby burn.

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[Bing Tsher E]

That anybody, or any entity, anywhere paid anything for YoVille is kind of scary.

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[arose]

So the tetris company was right all along?

Re:Zynga hahahahah

[Kalriath]

Song covers DO require a license, but that license (called a mechanical license) is one that can be attained from a clearing-house without authorisation from the copyright owner (it's a mandatory license defined in law). Tribute bands are the same, as they're essentially covers. The only ones that do not require a license are parodies (and Weird Al Yankovic actually does get permission from the original artists as a professional courtesy anyway, incidentally) and satire.

Awesome, I'm buying popcorn already.

[SpzToid]

Patent wars are so passé. I am so ready for the anti-poach wars!

EA vs Zynga

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's side are we supposed to be on?

Re:EA vs Zynga

[Makoska]

Who's side are we supposed to be on?

Battle for Wesnoth's LOL

Re:EA vs Zynga

[Anonymous Coward]

Good question. Certainly neither party to the lawsuit, and most definitely not with the lawyers. I'd have to say hope for all three to lose?

Re:EA vs Zynga

[i.am.delf]

Sometimes you need to root for both sides to fight and both to lose. I can't remember the original quote but it was about America selling weapons to both sides of a conflict because the US wanted both sides to lose.

Re:EA vs Zynga

[Baloroth]

Who's side are we supposed to be on?

Well, EA did once produce some good games, so them I suppose. They still have some potential: Zynga never had any. Zynga are also pretty blatant about ripping off other games producers (indie game makers included), EA are usually not quite so bad in that area at least.

Re:EA vs Zynga

[Tastecicles]

Because nobody ever went broke selling weapons. Look at my cousin Gaila. He went into weapons, I bought a bar. Now he owns his own moon, and I'm staring into the abyss, and my only hope for salvation is the Federation.

Re:EA vs Zynga

[seandiggity]

Who's side are we supposed to be on?

Anything that hurts Zynga, hurts facebook, as they reminded us over and over in the IPO filing. So, depends what you think of the Zuckerborg.

Re:EA vs Zynga

[Tastecicles]

if you're selling weapons the LAST thing you want is for either side to lose - which is why whatever you sell to one side, you sell to the other. This has several side effects, not least of which you get obscenely rich and you remain neutral (see: Switzerland during WWII, the US arms industry during the Iran-Iraq war and pretty much every other conflict since WWII...). The thing you want to keep in short supply, however, is ammunition.

Re:EA vs Zynga

[stoatwblr]

Actually, ammunition is the killer app. You sell weapons once. They need ammunition to function as such and they keep needing the stuff to continue functioning.

My choice

[meerling]

I'm cheering for EA on this one. Oh god, I feel sick and dirty, I need to take a shower now. :(

Re:My choice

[Mashiki]

Shite vs Shit. Tough choice sometimes, but one stinks less.

Re:My choice

[Nemyst]

This is one of the few times where I'll be cheering for the lawyers to suck as much money out of both of them as possible.

Re:My choice

[Penguinisto]

Sorta like watching Stalin go after Hitler. You want Stalin to win, but not win by too much.

Maybe, with little luck, Zynga can get stomped into oblivion (SCO-style would be nice), and EA loses so much money chasing it that they themselves are diminished to the point of leaving an opening for other companies.

But then there's Ubisoft. Is there anyway we can get Ubisoft involved in this too? Then maybe we can pray that they all obliterate each other.

Re:My choice

[mwvdlee]

You mean the feeling that you could have had a few more passenger seats if you bought a more expensive SUV?

Of they they want a jury trial

[Guru80]

It comes down to personal perception more than the law. EA is the big bad guy on the block, Zynga is the family friendly buddy on facebook. There are no good guys here though, both are greedy thieves who would rob you blind in a moment if they could do so legally. Welcome to the business of studio game development/publishing. Thank god for indies.

Horse race journalism considered harmful

[tepples]

Neither. As in political reporting, the concept of "sides" is one way that journalists turn stories into BS because they have vested interests in the public not learning what's really going on.

when two pieces of shit fight

[Osgeld]

does anyone give a crap? let them both sue each other into oblivion and the world will be a better place

A comparison

[TRRosen]

Well let's see.
Nether company creates there own games. EA buys them and Zynga steals them.
Both companies steal from their users it's just that EA does it $50 at a time while Zynga does it $.50 at a time.
Both companies treat gamers like crap.
EA abuses the hell out of professional developers while Zynga abuses the hell out of people that think they are developers.
(sorry Zynga workers but my dog writes better code)
EA uses huge expensive marketing campaigns of BS while Zynga just spams you until you give in.
EA often ruins good games after taking them over. Zynga often ruins good games after copying them and flooding the market with their version.
EA actions makes you hate them. Zynga's actions make you hate yourself.
All in all the world would be better off if neither existed. But the tie breaker goes to EA as we would actually miss their games.

Re:One-word joke.

[History's Coming To]

OK, I'll give it a go:

I heard in the latest beat-em-up Jim Parsons (Big Bang Theory) is going to fight the A-Team's BA. Zynga.

Redacted Counterclaims

[flimflammer]

It amazes me how often lawyers try to redact information from the public by changing the foreground and background to black when we can just select the text to reveal it.

Their counterclaim is full of not-so-redacted text.