Leaked Zynga Memo Justifies Copycat Strategy
forbes.com
forbes.com
From the memo
"A few of you have asked how our approach to genres relates to the situation we faced with Vostu. There are rules of engagement in our industry. Companies have to respect each other’s legal and IP ownership rights in the form of copyrights and trademarks. In the case of Vostu, you can see for yourself that Vostu crossed the line and chose to use our copyrighted IP and artwork. That’s different than competing to build the best product or out-innovate us in the City category."
So copying others artwork is ok when Zynga does it to others, but not when others do it to them.
See "Zynga stole everything they are suing us for Says Vostu" http://www.businessinsider.com/vostu-zynga-stole-everything-...
This doesn't just indicate that great game design takes a back seat to distribution, it promotes the idea that the fine line between plagiarism and inspiration doesn't exist and that they're one and the same. Businesses that operate like Zynga aren't new but what's new, at least to me, is seeing such a business, despite the criticism it gets, become such a media darling. They had Pinkus on the Today show or some other morning show the other day making him look like he's some genius mythical Zuckerberg type. Businesses with the rip off model are often successful as there's a sucker born every minute but I've never seen one get praise like Zynga as if they're doing something that's one iota innovative.
No one gets to have a monopoly on an idea (i m also against patents). Distribution (or more correctly, marketing and operations) is one of the more difficult, non-game-design related problems a gaming company faces, and all else equals, the company that profits is the one that can scale.
I feel like you are just critizing zynga simply because they got successful based on game ideas that others have failed to profit from. I don't see that as a problem - this is what nature intends, and the fittest survive. Those who makes the money deserves it.
"The guys who they're ripping off are the ones deserving of all the money Zynga is making off them."
Zynga outsourced being innovative to the market and focused their resources on building distribution. You have to work hard to build distribution and it is an important part of a business strategy. It is not enough to just design a great game and expect it to be a huge business success. It might be a huge creative success but that is different from being a business success.
Lets use Mcdonald's as an example (I am not a fan of their food but I think they illustrate a business that is built on distribution not quality product). People were making hamburgers before Mcdonalds, no innovation in the product. The value of the Mcdonalds business is in the vast network of restaurants that they built to deliver their product. Does the person who made the first hamburger deserve all the money that Mcdonalds is making? I would say no.
I think a lot of people on HN ignore the importance of the simple fact that distribution is a competitive advantage in business and it is something you have to work hard for. I think Zynga is taking advantage of a resource they worked hard to build, their distribution.
Hence, intellectual property protection (or whatever legal term is right here).
If the current framework can't penalize Zynga for ripping off someone else's hard work, I would say the system is broken for this use case at minimum.
There's a line between inspiration and stealing, and I would say Zynga isn't on the right side of such a line in this case.
Apple, when launched the iPod (could take many Apple examples but this is from the letter) didn't make a more-or-less copy of an existing successful product. Took inspiration from the idea of portable digital music and took it to the next level. Significantly better product.
Google didn't copy Yahoo!, seriously now! They took the idea of searching for pages and took it to the next level. Significantly better product.
To say they copied is like saying anyone who invents a new dish has copied the very first cooked meal in history. Seriously? People have just gotten amazing at gaming the system than playing the game.
- it'll get a crap rating and 10s of thousands of plays
- it'll get a great rating and hundreds of thousands or even millions of plays
Ultimately they succeed or not based on their own merit, having a ton of traffic to throw at them just helps it happen faster.
As far as succeeding without a huge platform behind you... that's kind of a different argument, it happens a lot to a limited extent, a little to a significant extent, but most of the time games just fail. Same as startups.
Yet, that's how it is. Adjusting and knowing that is empowering... "build a better mousetrip" isn't enough by itself; you also need to understand and connect with people who would benefit from the mousetrap, get the word out about the mousetrap to those people, and then find a sales/delivery mechanism so those people can buy the mousetrap and have a mouse-free life.
Distribution works the same way. It's where the money is.
The company that made the original game normally has enough time on the market to accumulate most of the users that are worth accumulating via open-market advertisements. It is likely that they hit "market saturation" prior to Zynga being able to clone the game.
Zynga has a massive existing userbase. When they clone an existing title, they're able to cheaply migrate some portion of their existing users over to the new title through cross-promotion. This is an effective way to retain users, but there is a significant problem: The original company (probably) already hit market saturation. The result, for Zynga, is that they can't really use this cloned game to grow their existing userbase. They can only use it to retain some users.
Fortunately for the original company, they aren't hurt all that much by Zynga's strategy - as long as they had enough time on the market before their game was cloned, the net effect of Zynga cloning their game isn't all that negative. The users that play Zynga's version tend to already have been Zynga users, and would only ever have played the Zynga game.
Unfortunately for Zynga, if this is their company vision, they will never grow their userbase. They will only ever struggle to keep hold of their existing users. They need to take risks and build unique, interesting games or they will face a slow death.
All Zynga has to do is get a same-game in the charts or viral and they get new users.
The similarity between SimTower/YootTower (same developer/designer!) and TinyTower is that they both have towers; the differences is basically everything else. Zynga's game is basically identically TinyTower with no other elements or changes.
"To use an analogy I’ve drawn on before, the gap between Tiny Tower and Sim Tower might be the difference between James Cameron‘s sci-fi Avatar and the similarly themed Dances with Wolves. However, the space between Tiny Tower and Zynga’s Dream Heights would be the difference between Dances with Wolves and another film set in the 1800s about Native Americans with the exact same plot, lookalike actors and titled 'Cavorting with Bears.'"
For the record, jmtb02 disagreed with some of drumcowski's comments in his response to drumcowski's response to Nimblebit's message[3].
[1] http://armorgames.com/play/7348/corporation-inc [2] http://i.imgur.com/ajaYt.jpg [3] http://i.imgur.com/eSEt7.jpg
What makes me really sad is thinking about how many talented engineers and designers there are working at companies like Zynga, doing a kick-ass job of building clones for companies with no values.
The only tangible I can sense with content (code, media, etc) is how it's provided, and that means that service is the entirety of our business. Zynga isn't producing original content, but they are producing a valuable service. Do I think it's ethical? No way. But should it be illegal? Not unless you want to limit how we can use data.
In this case, what Zynga is doing is copying game design. And in a perfect world...I think it should be perfectly legal to copy game design, because the alternative is software patents, and do I really need to spell out why that sucks?
But it's still ethically and morally wrong, and we should name and shame Zynga, their developers, and their enablers. How about a boycott of Amazon until they yank Zynga's hosting? (And yes, I realize their isn't the slightest hope of such a thing...)
Call me naive, but I would at least like to believe that these types of practices cannot sustain a business forver, and eventually a player who does things the right way will win out.
This sentence really spelled it out:
"We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality."
The evolution Pincus is justifying here is taking a known game and making it free, or social or (in his mind) higher quality.
He is admitting right there to effectively "We evolve games by stealing them and making them work on our facebook delivery platform"
And calls it "innovation"
That is plain despicable.
> We evolve genres by making [apps] free, ..., accessible, and highest quality.
This is arguably what Internet Explorer did to Netscape. The "genre" of web browsers did, in fact, evolve quite a bit in response.
This is an industry of blatant copying.
The "genre" you speak of is so shallow - whereas the "genre" of online/mobile games is a fucking galaxy by comparison.
Case in point, Zynga's "Words With Friends". It is the best version of online Scrabble I've played.
(Apparently it was developed by Newtoy and acquired by Zynga. And in my humble opinion, Zynga's "improvements" over the past year have had nothing to do with "evolving high quality", but are fairly blatant attempts to wrangle cash and facebook information out of me. But that's another story.)
However if you make a feature-by-feature copy of GemCraft, I'm not going to think much of you. And that seems to be what Zynga did here. They didn't build a better mousetrap, they build the exact same mousetrap and used their market position to grift Nimblebit's success.
Please explain to me why, because I literally don't get why it is so wrong and imoral.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Zynga, but I do copy the shit out of stuff.
Why can't we use other people work to create our own. If someone took my thesis and turned it in and got an A, I would be psyched for them and happy they used my work. It doesn't hurt me at all.
The problem is that Zynga isn't operating in a vacuum. Sales lost to Zynga do hurt someone else.
In the University paper example, how would you feel if the number of A grades available were limited, and because someone copied a previous year's A-paper, someone who deserved an A now received a B? What if that person was you?
There's a spectrum between inspiration and impersonation, and Zynga is clearly on the impersonation side. IMO, it's extremely disingenuous of Pincus to try to pass of his game as somehow derivative of Sim Tower or Yoot Tower. I'm surprised he wrote a memo at all, considering that Zynga employees aren't stupid - they know what brings in the money, and it isn't coming up with fun, novel, interesting games that are built upon the shoulders of giants.
In this case the original creator isn't hurt at all and actually may benefit. Would you consider this ok?
If it is ok, where do you draw the line?
So far from people's answers to my question "what is so morally wrong with this?" I do not think the reaction that it is so wrong is as cut and dry issue as we want it to be. But, if I am missing something obvious, I would actually really appreciate the insight!
In this case the original creator isn't hurt at all and actually may benefit. Would you consider this ok?
Generall, IMO, if you're literally cloning someone else's game (or other content), it would be very difficult to justify. I think the only time I could see this working is if you're bringing the cloned game to another platform that is not being served by the original creator, with the original creator's blessing.
So far from people's answers to my question "what is so morally wrong with this?" I do not think the reaction that it is so wrong is as cut and dry issue as we want it to be. But, if I am missing something obvious, I would actually really appreciate the insight!
Most people wish that effort=reward, and it is aggravating to see Zynga do well in spite of their apparent lack of effort, at least in the game design department. What makes it worse is that at this stage of Zynga's existence, they have the resources to create original IP. One could conclude that their game design decisions are driven purely by a backwards-looking perspective, instead of a forward-looking one.
Not sure if this is devils advocate, but i'll answer.
If someone copies one paper, theres a legitimate argument that maybe it doesn't matter. But if copying in university was rife, people would just copy each others work and not learn anything, going through school for the monetary benefit only. Now lets say the subject is History, perhaps you don't care either way (short-sighted opinion, but the benefits are difficult to quantify). But now lets say this is medicine. All doctors cheat on their exams and research papers, so no-one knows anything, and even those who do bother to learn find it difficult to advance medical knowledge much further than the architects of all the original work.
So now does this attitude hurt you? Probably.
Games are far less important in life than professions like medicine. But Zynga must be one of the richest games companies around right now, and I'm not sure they actually know how to design their own games. Certainly i've never seen an original piece of work from them, everything is a rip off of smaller developers works, heavily marketed to eclipse the original creators. Who knows what this is doing to the facebook games market in the long term? (of course, the world might be a better place without so much facebook, but thats another story)
I don't think the same set of moral constraints apply in Zynga's case. They aren't trying to prove themselves to some 3rd party. The whole point of Zynga is to make money for the people who own and work at Zynga. And apparently duplicating other people's games is working pretty well as a way of meeting that objective. There's definitely nothing noble about what they're doing. And I don't know how much effort they are putting in, but certainly seem to be doing what they are doing (which is distributing games, not producing innovative games) better than everyone else.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the concept and design of these games is totally interchangeable, and the real value is in the marketing and analytics that Zynga does so well, which shoots that analogy right in the foot.
It's like saying Seattle Computer ripped off Digital Research because Q-DOS was very similar to CP/M. In some ways, they did - they were really similar - but one is a reimplementation of a superset of the other.
Having said that, I'm mostly uncomfortable with these "second mover" (or "first copycat") companies. It's not that hard to come up with original ideas and the process you use to come up with those will give you both an insight on what makes an idea good and a number of ideas you may be able to use later. It's definitely worth the try.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/16/zynga-sues-brazilian-copyc...
I have no words for Zynga's hypocrisy.
With regard to the situation, I don't think Zynga gets nearly enough credit for its success. It is not that easy to copy software and get the same degree of success. Yet Zynga routinely copies and gets greater success. There is something there that deserves attention.
Zynga has operational chops that should not be underestimated. Whatever it is doing is cutting edge and enough of an advantage Zynga can even flourish doing nothing but blatantly derivative designs.
Eventually, those operational practices will spread to other game studios that do original designs and it will be harder for Zynga to do as well. But much like McDonalds, Zynga could enjoy its market superiority for a long time to come as long as it continues to innovate operationally even if it lags creatively.
What could go wrong?
They could make a bad copy, but they already should have enough in-house skill to make the suckiest game pretty polished. They have tons of reusable code. Tons of cash.
They could copy a game but miss out on some secret sauce that makes the original work better. I think they can control this by releasing to smaller groups and fixing mistakes early, or just dump a game if there's no traction.
So...what else could go wrong when copying a game?
Operations does play a huge part in keeping the customers playing (user retention), it's true. The game has to look slick and not crash. Their ops teams must be wizards. Their design teams, not so much.
How many updates has angry birds made since their first release? They're always releasing new levels and updates.
I'm not defending what Zynga does in any way, but success brings copycats and first to market does not guarantee dominance of that market by any means.
I do wonder if there's any internal tension between design and development - surely there's someone there thinking "We're ripping of game X. This can't be right."