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.
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.
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.