Zynga Shamelessly Rips Off 'Tiny Tower' With Canadian Release of 'Dream Heights'
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"They would sit and look at competitive products and write down all the features and make it obvious to us," the designer says. One contractor says he was offered freelance work from Zynga, related to mimicking a competitor's application, with explicit instructions: "Copy that game." http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/09/zynga_pincus_cop...
Pincus was heard yelling at employees, "I don't fucking want innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/
More examples: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-zynga-is-just-like-micros...
You could argue Tiny Tower ripped off Sim Tower etc.
The whole thing is stupid. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, even other giants.
Ignoring the differences is like ignoring the acting, dialog and artwork in a first person shooter because they're all just grabbing weapons, running around, and hitting the shoot button.
Farmville in its current iteration is designed to involve your facebook freinds at every level.
Its reward schedule is blatantly designed to encourage social sharing - basically making players skinner boxes for other players.
Tiny tower on the other hand can be played in entirely single player fashion, without really being bothered by "Oh you need 3 paint flecks to paint window X! 5 windows, 2 chairs, 4 cuboards, 2 cashiers left to open store! Ask your friends for parts"
Farmville is far more diabolical than tiny tower. Its obvious the tiny tower guys are more into making a game, while farmville is just plain sinister.
Based on other similar news stories in the past, it seems like this is Zynga's general business plan. While it appears profitable and is legal, it's hardly a laudable practice.
Zynga has actually had an improving track record in the last 6 months with Adventure World, Hidden Chronicles and Dream Zoo. They're still sticking to "hit" genres, but they have been pushing out of cloneville and taking more risks.
The game made by Nimblebit looks like a fairly specific and deliberate Sim type game designed in a specific way for mobile devices. I think the screenshots chosen are good enough to come to the conclusion that it's a clone.
What I'm saying is that Zynga is aware of their past and is moving towards less copy and more creativity. I think their actually released products in the last 6 months are a testament to that. Dream Zoo is a great example of coming into a genre, "Zyngafying" it, and coming out with a hit product that's better than the competition. They even built new tech that they've open sourced and shared with the Cocos2d community. But no one talks about that because it's easier to hate Zynga than it is to make a reasoned discussion about them.
People seem to have forgotten this already:
Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus, who reportedly told his employees, “I don’t fucking want innovation.”
And it's bad when a Giant tries to crush a little studio, copying their games, while at the same time, suing others for doing the exact same thing. (Vostu)
There was a discussion about that on HN some days ago:
According to a marketing guy from Betable, a real-money gambling platform with a vested interest in making you think exactly that.
WoW, Farmville, all use a skinnerian model - different reward types on variable, regular and random schedules designed to make sure that you get that next dopamine buzz just right in time. leastI don't doubt that some of these games need someone to take a look into them. Likely we need legislation such as that which covers the gambling industry or rules such as those that cover the slot machine industry.
I know the regulation idea may not be popular here though (I dislike it). Yet we agree that the gambling industry needs checks and balances, in which case Zynga does too (or at the very least, someone to check)
Edit: For clarity. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Also: If I am getting downvoted, I'd love to know why people disagree with me.
Then you go on to say "we agree the gambling industry needs checks and balances", which is pretty damned presumptuous. Have you completely failed to notice the strong libertarian bent of HN?
In many ways, I'm practically a socialist, but I cringe outwardly at the thought that government should regulate the behavior of consenting adults.
Yes, gambling can be seriously problematic for some people and their families/loved ones, and I'm not against government efforts to educate people and help treat problem gamblers, nor am I against things like requiring casinos to post odds, but go any further and you quickly get way outside my comfort zone.
Think of drugs and take a guess at how many people on HN actually support the "war on drugs". The number people who agree with special regulation of gambling is probably quite similar, and quite small.
For the record: I am not advocating suffocation by regulation. I am asking where the line is drawn, and how people feel about the basic marriage between operant conditioning and micro transactions.
Responding to what you said about WoW and Farmville: I did specify that I am talking about the REWARD systems employed by the games. Having played both, I know the differences between them as games. (suffered as a Shaman from nearly version 1)
Both though do use basic operant conditioning techniques. In WoW you have your XP bar which gives you your fixed ratio reinforcement, and then drops which provide your variable ratio reinforcement. Then you have your various other schedules which come from leveling up professions, progression, achievements and so on.
Farmville has similar mechanisms - your constant crop growth and timings are your regular reinforcement and then you have random drops which provide your variable reinforcement.
There really isn't any other science behind these systems when it comes to how the reward mechanisms are designed.
The games themselves are very different. Skill/ingenuity does play a huge role in WoW (like the rogue who soloed patchwork), I am in no way comparing the skill requirements of the two games. Farmville can be played by a bot.
The reward schedules, which is what he's talking about, are exactly the same.
In the case of gambling, I think the only protection the public needs is education ("the house always wins")--in the UK, at least, gambling regulation is usually in place to isolate gambling from other criminal activities e.g. money laundering, and to make sure the house isn't cheating, i.e. that it's a game of chance. Neither of those rationales seem to be necessary for skinner-box-like-games.
At one end, there is the market will solve it approach, and if it isn't broke, why fix it?
After reading your comment, the most I could suggest would be game companies having to show the general rate of growth players could be expected (average, maximal).
But I really don't buy the idea that gamblers are the target market. I know that demo very well, as my previous life was spent running numbers for an online gambling company (my experience with market analysis in that context got me most of my recent work), and I've always been a bit of a poker junkie myself. The Facebook crowd is far more casual, far more female, and far less into tangible, liquid rewards than the gambling crowd.
Mistaking the motivations of this crowd is a serious mistake, and if you are under the assumption that the Facebook gaming crowd is made up of Pokerstars castoffs, for the sake of your business I strongly encourage you to reevaluate the situation. While there may be surface similarities in the addictive natures of these games, the people that spend money on gambling are almost always looking for real life gains; this stands in strong opposition to the typical motivation of a Facebook gamer, who is in it for the fantasy alone.
I'm not saying that Facebook would not make a great market for real life gamblers, but at the moment, it's not feasible because they don't allow actual gambling. And the real gamblers know the difference - they won't even play on fake money poker sites, for the most part, even the ones that are quite badly addicted to poker. I seriously doubt that they're the same people that sink money into Facebook games to buy virtual goods that let them decorate their farms or give their avatars new haircuts...
Plus, Zynga sues when they think they get copied (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/war-zynga-sues-the-hell-out...). There's a good chance that Nimblebit won't have enough money to fight back.
Then they should get out there and make original games. They're as much to blame as anyone. Sarah Lacy's article yesterday mentioned Zynga as one of the sexy places to work in SV. People want to work there, despite the shady practices.
We have this tendency to act like the little guy has no blame in things like this, whether it's war or the financial crisis or making bad social games. Like there's some line drawn between evil corporate and good little employees. Guess what? If the developers aren't going there and punching the clock every day, these games aren't getting made.
Sim Tower is an elevator/people flow simulation. It's also much more fun than Tiny Tower.
Now I can properly procrastinate by figuring out how on earth to run Sim Tower on a 3-month-old Mac. Thanks again!
About the only thing Tiny Tower and SimTower have in common is the word "Tower".
My wife cannot play Tiny Tower anymore, she has every floor possible (153), 12 vacant floors (waiting for more floor types to build), 30 million coins and 250 bux.
Is this what an "iPhone Game Of The Year" acts like?
It seems to me that Tiny Tower was a great fad.
I still sort of wonder how much work it would be to release an update that i just new floors, not other new functionality.
I imagine it is work..still sort of want it!
The game industry is a massive fest of copying each other. How many Doom clones are out there? Or the Pacman variety? Or the Breakouts? Space Invaders?
I am in the process of saving private $$$ for a game project that I think will break even in the long run. If there was a good chance of being cloned before that happens, I wouldn't bother.
I always say, when asked sage game design advice, that a hit game is like the center point of a circle. The closer YOUR game is to the center the more likely it's a clone. If it's far OUTSIDE the circle that it's just to far from what people know to be a hit.
The goal is to hit the line of the circle, which makes the circle move to include your game and maybe make it the new center point.
Video game companies copy each other. It's up to the consumer to decide which version is worth their money. I for one welcome some competition to Tiny Tower, especially after the game was ruined for me when I found out that setting the iPhone clock ahead allowed you to cheat the game..
Bad example. UT and Q3A were released withing 10 days of each other. The development time for an FPS such as Q3 doesn't leave much time for it to copy UT. On the other hand, Tiny Tower has been around for about half a year, plenty of time for Zynga to imitate as it pleases.
You can't be against the patent game the big guys play but for protection against this kind of behavior.
edit to add: If I worked on the blatant copy, I wouldn't exactly be proud of that work.
They are a publicly traded company now.
Added: So, sadly they do this kind of repulsive things. "PR will handle the rest somehow." they must think. =/ Well, let's hope that costs them a lot.
Clearly you have no idea what concerns many people here about patents, otherwise you wouldn't be making a comparison like that.
But seriously, the whole time I played tiny tower, all I could think about was where was the rage over copying yoot saito?
Why would it be ok to just copy other people work and enjoy it, while creating something similar to something else is not ok?
All in all it certainly looks like the "glorified slot machine" formula of "social gaming" is dying, and that is immensely gratifying to me.
I want to make sure I'm reading your comment correctly: are you trying to say that people are too stupid to figure out they're being played, and that they'll run on the Zynga treadmill for as long as Zynga pleases?
I think data presents a reality less cynical than yours.