The only reason why Zynga bought them is because Draw Something is so high profile, that there was no way Zynga could steal it.
As I said over on Quora, this really sucks as Zynga is a despicable company.
Surely, the folks at OMGPOP had been worried that Zynga would try to steal this game, as they have done every one else -- and I would be interested to know what they thought of Pincus' character prior to the purchase.
At least they get to stay in NYC and be no place close to Pincus.
I hate Zynga games because of how buggy and slow they are.
But it's not like Zynga doesn't add value. The examples I've seen of Zynga copying the base of other games also have them making significant adaptations to better fit the market. Zynga really understands the market a lot better than many of the little guys, and they add lots of value to lots of users that way. I'm curious if there are counterexamples.
This is really disappointing for me.. (well.. from a games on my phone perspective)
I used to really like Words with Friends.
Then zynga did an app update where the icon was more about the zynga logo than the Words with Friends logo. (reverted after user backlash)
Then it was more and more 'buy our other games!' notifications.
Then the facebook integration slowed the app down so much it took 3-4x as long to actually play the game.
Yesterday I was saying to myself. Draw Something is so much better than Words with Friends, because it doesnt throw ANY of the zynga shit at me.
I actually found Draw Something to be pretty bad even before reading this. The whole game seems to be written in a too portable manner, ie., all UI elements self-written and noticeably different from UIKit, no GameCenter, the sizes are all weird...
I hope somebody does the reverse thing of Zynga and builds a LIGHTER, Apple-like version of it, I'd jump ship in an instant. Especially after going through the painful WWF fiasco. It might even be possible to get an App Store spotlight by being more "loyal" to Apple's way of doing things, and obviously not being portable.
If Mark Pincus was more open about it and said "We're better marketers, business builders, and job creators than the original game creators. Yeah we copy their games, we might not be original and creative but we're a lot more valuable for the market, and for the consumer." we'd see Zynga in a different light. It's the fact that he's completely delusional about it.
Here's a quote from Mark Pincus, "I am proud of the ethical and fair way that we've built this company.". That's what makes Zynga despicable. And Pincus a scary person. He's obviously an intelligent businessman but he's so caught up in his own bullshit that he actually believes it. That's what makes it frightening.
Well, let's be fair. OMGPOP is hardly a bastion of game design originality. For example, dinglepop is a 100% complete rip-off of Puzzle Bobble / Bust a Move, which Taito released in 1994. There have been countless clones since then, and there's nothing distinguishing dinglepop from any of them.
I guess I heard about that Tiny Tower thing... my takeaway is that nearly everybody borrows ideas from one another. Ideas are cheap, it's the implementation that really matters. Zynga has the means to move on things faster than a lot of competitors.
>>Here's a quote from Mark Pincus, "I am proud of the ethical and fair way that we've built this company.". That's what makes Zynga despicable.
That Mark Pincus claims his company operates in a fair and ethical way (which you disagree with) makes Zynga despicable?
I feel like the Zynga bashing is a product of the feedback loop that is tech news. Just a few years ago, Zynga was lauded as a great company, and Pincus as a great CEO: http://crunchies2010.techcrunch.com/ How quickly popular opinion can change. I wonder if a lot of the hate stems from Zynga's success in a space where many entrepreneurs had invested heavily and ultimately failed.
This isn't "borrowing". This is IP theft. And these aren't "ideas" these are full blown products.
"Ideas are cheap, it's the implementation that really matters."
The games that Zynga copies were not "ideas" they were IP. And Zynga wasn't inspired by them. Zynga flat out, straight up, cloned them.
When you work your ass off, sacrifice time with your family, your savings, and invest it into building a profitable flash game online, iterating week after week until you get the formula just right. Only to have a bully come by and clone it. That my friend, is NOT borrowing. That's NOT implementing an idea differently. That is theft. Those are unfair business practices.
People like me are angry at Pincus because his method, if it becomes popular, could completely fuck up the startup ecosystem.
What if ALL of silicon valley starting acting like Pincus? Instead of acquiring sites and IP fairly, they simply cloned them. What if Google simply cloned YouTube div for div, color for color, feature for feature? What if Amazon cloned the technology used in Kiva's robotic logistics system instead of acquiring the company? What if Microsoft cloned skype and its algorithms instead of acquiring it? This isn't Github where you can fork someone else's work. These are companies that people put their lives and savings accounts into.
Here's how it works:
1: Crazy young entrepreneurs risk everything to find a new profitable business or build a new product. Because they're small they can easily pivot and reiterate day after day and evolve their product/solution/business faster than a big company.
2: They find something that works, VCs jump on board to grow the business/product/service and the crazy young entrepreneurs who worked their asses off expand their business/service/product.
3: Big players like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon can use their muscle and dollars to acquire the startup and assimilate it into itself and offer this unique new service/business/product to their established customers. Thus benefiting the entrepreneurs who try new things, the investors who help grow new things, the big players with lots of established customers, and the end users. So many people benefit from this ecosystem.
What Zynga does is dangerous. It basically gives the little guy the finger, steals their hard earned IP and doesn't give anything back. This is what makes it despicable. Most entrepreneurs keep their voice down about it because they don't want to look like angry disgruntled losers who are envious of a successful entrepreneur. But if you don't call it out and say anything about it and on top of that give Pincus a CEO of the year award... That hurts all of us.
On top of all this, Zynga sees nothing wrong with what it does. Again, if they were open about the whole thing they'd be seen in a slightly better light. Still unethical copycats that hurt an ecosystem but at least honest about it. If they did the right thing and properly acquired the games they clone, we'd all be cheering Pincus on.
In China, the big players crush small startups by cloning them within a few days of them getting popular, and in some cases deploy dirty tactics against them (I'm thinking of an antivirus being interfered with on users' computers because it was removing part of a giant's software - was Tencent involved?). The point is that in China, everything gets cloned really quickly and the big players keep winning the market by pushing the new services out to their existing users, who don't seem to care that much about not letting one company dominate. It's a horrible model that I believe is entrenched by the big boys having influence with those in power.
How come this doesn't happen in the US, where copying does take place, but less directly and quickly? It's not like quickly copying a startup idea is illegal, and anyone can claim they've been working on something similar to a new idea for a while. Is it perhaps because there's a diversity of channels and forums by which new startups can market themselves, whereas in China everyone uses Baidu/QQ/Renren/Weibo and some of those sites possibly block out competitors' marketing?
I don't know, just thinking out loud and looking for more-informed opinions.
Some games are hard to clone within a few days even with tens of engineers and artists. How fast do you think a Chinese game company could clone Skyward Sword? Or even how fast do you think it would take Zynga for that matter? There are other games too, up and down the spectrum of AAA to garage-indie, that I don't think are so easy to copy in a short period of time--especially not short enough that you could dispel the first mover advantage if it was actually something worth copying. There are of course even more technologies outside the game industry that are hard to copy that startups have already gotten in to or even grown into. Amazon seems like a hard company to copy everything they do and still win.
What's personally depressed me about all these mobile games and their companies is they're all just circle-jerking and ripping off the same games that came out 10-20 years ago as well as digitalizing games that have been around for hundreds of years, and many of them I think "I could clone at least 90% of that in a weekend"... I don't think there's anything morally wrong with them, but it's not my cup of tea for what I want to play or how I would want to make money and I do sense a lack of "taste". I think OMGPOP got their payday, leave them alone. But I also think if you're in the business of what can be easily duplicated in terms of effort, as opposed to flat out copying files, prepare for the big companies to win.
In light of pg's recent article amounting to "information wants to be free" and there's nothing we can do about it...
How, exactly, is what Zynga is doing different from pirating films, music, or software? In both cases, it seems to me that the original creator hasn't lost anything. They still have their game. They still get to say "they" made it. Etc.
Are we really only against pirating when it helps big companies and not when it hurts them?
Wasn't me, I actually think it's a good question, really made me think. In this instance I don't believe an "all or nothing" attitude about all IP is healthy. The same way an all or nothing attitude about taxes, war, death penalty, and freedom of speech is healthy. Too much protection and we get patent trolling, not enough protection and we get IP theft leading to less innovation and unfair treatment of the inventors. Naturally, our instinct is to share something with friends when we discover it. Which is why music and movies are pirated so much. Stealing IP, that's also a human instinct passed down from our lovely evolutionary primate relatives. To an extent it's beneficial (creative commons, github forking, open source projects) and too much stealing/borrowing is destructive to its inventors while really beneficial to the stealing party (Like the way China's been "borrowing" high speed rail and maglev technology from Siemens, Transrapid, and other companies and re-patenting everything with slight changes so they can avoid licensing costs and can resell the technology as "Chinese Innovation"). At that level it's really unacceptable, pirating music and movies here and there, that's entertainment, it's not right but it's not seriously destructive to society.
Google didn't buy YouTube because they didn't want to build YouTube, they bought it because everybody was on it and they couldn't gain traction with G Video. Same with Microsoft and Skype. Same with most acquisitions, including Draw Something.
Big companies clone each others IP all the time. What do you think Bing, Android and Google+ are? They are just clones of other peoples IP...
Zynga isn't buying this for the IP, nor is the IP itself what is truly valuable. They are buying it for the traction. When some small game company builds a tiny game that never takes off in any meaningful way and Zynga clones it and instantly creates something 10000x more popular than the original ever was, that is not the same thing. The smaller company had no userbase, community and traction to buy therefore they were not valuable to Zynga in the same way that Draw Something is.
Google didnt have a long history of already outright stealing others' work.
What you reference are not clones. They are services in the same space with utterly different UI/UX/features and an /attempt/ at differing value props.
ZYNGA MAKES EXACT CLONES - there is a difference. If you are not familiar with the topic, don't comment as though you're having some new profound insight.
I don't understand what people are missing about Zynga. I feel like I am talking to people who have about zero historical context of shit that has been happening in Silicon Valley.
Did you just discover the internet today? The list is endless. They hired people when they were small at lower wages with stock options. Then when they made it big they took those options away! The scumbag CEO claimed he was right because if he didn't do this a cook might become rich, as if a cook has no right to get FU money for taking a risk. Every game they have is a rip off of other people's. The CEO has said in interviews that he's done ever evil thing there is to do to gain success.
If you don't think Zynga is a despicable company than I can't imagine you believe this is such a thing.
The only reason why Zynga bought them is because Draw Something is so high profile, that there was no way Zynga could steal it.
As I said over on Quora, this really sucks as Zynga is a despicable company.
Surely, the folks at OMGPOP had been worried that Zynga would try to steal this game, as they have done every one else -- and I would be interested to know what they thought of Pincus' character prior to the purchase.
At least they get to stay in NYC and be no place close to Pincus.