I'm actually supporting EA on this one...
For those who don't know who Zynga is, they are a games company who primarily make their money by cloning smaller companies facebook games and then use their financial might to push the smaller company out of the market.
It's not a simple case of them borrowing the same game idea, they have frequently been accussed of copying everything about the game to the point where they are pretty much identical - even down to the artwork and level design. There seems to be no inovation at Zynga. They just pick a small up-and-coming game, clone it and sell it on.
Unfortunately for them, they seem to have decided to cloned EA's 'The Sims Social', calling it 'The Ville'. This may be the first time they have cloned a game owned by a company who have the financial clout to fight back, and that's exactly what EA are doing.
EA have stated that they are making a stand against how Zynga behaves:
“This is a case of principle. Maxis isn’t the first studio to claim that Zynga copied its creative product. But we are the studio that has the financial and corporate resources to stand up and do something about it. Infringing a developer’s copyright is not an acceptable practice in game development. By calling Zynga out on this illegal practice, we hope to have a secondary effect of protecting the rights of other creative studios who don’t have the resources to protect themselves.”
More information from Rock Paper Shotgun here - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/03/ea-suing-zynga-over-the-ville-to-take-a-stand/
This is going to be an interesting one to watch.
For those who don't know who Zynga is, they are a games company who primarily make their money by cloning smaller companies facebook games and then use their financial might to push the smaller company out of the market.
It's not a simple case of them borrowing the same game idea, they have frequently been accussed of copying everything about the game to the point where they are pretty much identical - even down to the artwork and level design. There seems to be no inovation at Zynga. They just pick a small up-and-coming game, clone it and sell it on.
Unfortunately for them, they seem to have decided to cloned EA's 'The Sims Social', calling it 'The Ville'. This may be the first time they have cloned a game owned by a company who have the financial clout to fight back, and that's exactly what EA are doing.
EA have stated that they are making a stand against how Zynga behaves:
“This is a case of principle. Maxis isn’t the first studio to claim that Zynga copied its creative product. But we are the studio that has the financial and corporate resources to stand up and do something about it. Infringing a developer’s copyright is not an acceptable practice in game development. By calling Zynga out on this illegal practice, we hope to have a secondary effect of protecting the rights of other creative studios who don’t have the resources to protect themselves.”
More information from Rock Paper Shotgun here - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/03/ea-suing-zynga-over-the-ville-to-take-a-stand/
This is going to be an interesting one to watch.
