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[PA Comic] Monday, August 6, 2012 - Fleamium
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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Also I would totally name a game "Unannounced EA Clone", even if it had nothing to do with EA.
The dog is just a characterization of the Zynga logo.
I think the dog is Zynga's logo?
what's the uh, sarcasm color or whatever? just imagine that it's on that sentence.
Great comic though, I love the dog's expressions.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
Zynga is out of their fucking minds. They already responded to EA's lawsuit announcement saying they're going to fight back. They're pretty much saying, "We're going to court to get smacked down." I actually dislike the company. It's their culture. Buy everything small, copy other people's products. Like not just the premise, it's like copy EVERYTHING.
... I don't know what to say to this
Never once in my life thought I would say this: EA needs to win this lawsuit.
You're right. Life is good at curveballs.
But could Zynga counter sue because "Sim City Social" is too much like "CityVille"?
Probably not. Zynga doesn't have their own ideas...ever, really. I feel like EA had a copyright on most of the functions of their games long before Zynga came out with the copycat versions.
Not really, the sim city franchise predates cityville by... decades? If anything cityville is a sim city knockoff.
Well I think the difference here is that EA don't care about being douchebags as log as it turns them a profit, they're just a faceless, amoral, corperate money making machine. Zynga on the other hand, from the ground up are a company that seems to have a corperate philosophy of being raging asshats for its own sake.
It's not the first time you'd be cheering for EA. They counter-suited against Tim Langdell, a famous patent troll, and won. The court stripped his goddamn "EDGE" patent / copyright bullshit.
But it really is. Zynga are just straight up rip-off merchants but most of the people they've ripped off are too small to even think of doing anything about it. Whilst you can't (rightly so) copyright game mechanics Zynga's perfect reproduction of other's ideas combined with the (at times) startlingly similar art direction is basically grotesque.
EA laying the smackdown is doing it for every developer who'd had their semi-popular game cloned to fuck by Zynga.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Zynga has resources to run people down in a battle of attrition via legal fees. The small guys eventually will run out of money, and it's not like there's a lot of lawyers who will work on this sort of case pro-bono. The Federal or State governments don't file these sort of lawsuits on behalf of individuals or small companies. Just because a major corporation does wrong doesn't mean they're automatically penalized for it; it costs money to make it happen.
That's why EA is in a unique position. They have the resources others don't. Now, if they were really altruistic about sticking up for the little guys they would have acted before this, but it would look weird. In this manner, they have an indisputable beef to go to court over. Further, the timing is great as far as I'm concerned. Zynga's leadership is bailing on the company, the stock is in the pits, they spent way more money than they should have acquiring competition and is getting little returns. It's a sinking ship.
Part of me has the strangest feeling that they don't really care so much about the "hard work" and "creativity" of its employees but they rather see this as a perfect opportunity to dip their hands in another branch of gaming. As it stands zygna is pretty much on it's last legs, and this lawsuit could really hurt them financially. Wouldn't surprise me if it ends up with EA suddenly purchasing a zygna and adding another business to their giant video game conglomerate.
If their numbers keep going down like they are for a few more quarters, then I'd start worrying about them.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
That's fair enough, but everything about Zynga happens in fast forward. I made the comparison to when you watch those videos of a flower growing and blossoming, watching the day night cycle happen multiple times in a few seconds. That's Zynga. They built up fast and have run into trouble just as fast.
They're like a schoolyard bully who has honed their game picking on really weak kids, and then decides to try and take on the goddamn gym teacher, because that seems like a great idea.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
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Also copyright law is balls crazy at times so I wouldn't in any way assume it's a cast iron certain thing they'd win, no matter how blatant the copying goes. They haven't actually stolen the raw code so a judge might feel that their minor changes are enough to get away with it.
I actually didn't hear about that one.
Copyright crap always makes me cranky. Everything from this stuff that today's comic is about to that stuff that this dude said was his.
There is no such thing as a good story where copyrights are concerned.
I think they know how many eyes are on this case. I can't imagine, with their (relatively) recent attempts to woo the indie scene, that they are entirely opposed to helping out the little guys from time to time.
They did, however, poach mid level EA execs before making their Sims rip-off. that's the thing that's going to kill them at trial.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Suing for anything less than someone trying to pull a 'Jay's potato chips'(With a cursive J that looks like a L) is kind of a dick move and sets a bad precedent.
While true about the desktop versions of SimCity....
How does that relate to the Facebook version?
Because I've played both CityVille and SimCity Social and they play exactly the same. With neither one playing anything at all like SimCity 1-4.
There's the false "stealing" people claim when a genre or theme is pursued, and then there's the kind where a game was just copied at all points. I don't begrudge Activision and EA having their FPS war games because they at least bring their own takes on things. It may be boring, but they certainly don't copy level design to the brick.
True. But we should keep in mind that just because people hate the business model, doesn't mean it's about to fail.
As much as people hate them, Zynga games make money. Someone is playing them. A lot of someones. And most of their users apparently don't care, they just play the game with the best production values. Even when they do make original games, those games don't seem to do as well. (That could just be the slow burnout of the Facebook market, though). For some reason, people want the giant -ville games. That market by no means a given of course, and if Zynga, (or any other Facebook game company), takes it for granted, it will end badly for them.
Also, not to conflate the two, but it amuses the hell out of me that Adventure World, which Zynga made and was pretty good, (and naturally didn't do nearly as well as the giant -ville games), was clearly a major inspiration for Outernauts (AW+Space Pokemon), which was in the comic the other week.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Well see, something that's happened with Zynga despite it's "growth" (this is something cloudeagle has been able to point out) is that the user base hasn't grown as the same rate as product offerings. The consumer base is spreading thin over their catalog, rather than making multiple investments. And it's not helping to draw in as many people. They make money, I won't deny that, but it's progressively less money as time goes on.
Right. And they need to figure out how to deal with that, or they WILL be in trouble. But this lawsuit isn't going to be the thing that takes them down. It will keep their stock price low, though.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.