Indie developer Nimblebit dropped a PR bomb on Zynga yesterday with it’s letter addressing the similarities between their hit iPhone game Tiny Tower and Zynga’s upcoming release, Dream Heights. This galvanized the gaming community, with thousands of people, from prominent bloggers to gamers on Reddit criticizing the company.
However, just after the new year, Atari ordered the removal of Black Powder Media’s Vector Tanks, a game strongly inspired by Atari’s Battlezone. This galvanized the community in a similar way, except this time, gamers were furious that Atari shut down an indie game company that made an extremely similar game.
Unfortunately, the line between inspiration and copying is incredibly blurry at best. The one thing that’s certain is that copying is here to stay. Copying has been present in some form since the dawn of capitalism (if you need proof, just go to the toothpaste isle of your local supermarket). The game industry is no stranger to this trend: game companies have been copying each other for years. Given it’s repeated success, there’s little reason to think that this practice will stop. Indie flash game studio XGEN Studios posted a response to Nimblebit, showing that their hit games were also copied:
Some would even argue that the incredibly successful iOS game Angry Birds was a copy of the popular Armor Games flash game, Crush the Castle, but then Crush the Castle was inspired by others that game before it. Social games even borrow many of their game mechanics from slot machines to increase retention. So what is copying, or more importantly, which parts of it are moral and immoral? Everyone seems to have a different answer, but it’s safe to say that people always copy the most successful ideas. The one thing that those in the Zynga-Nimblebit conversation seems to have overlooked is that everyone copies others in some way.
Of course, while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it doesn’t feel good to be imitated when a competitor comes after your users. In this case, people may question Zynga’s authenticity and make a distinction between inspiration and outright duplication. But at the same time, Zynga’s continued success with the “watch, then replicate” model shows that marketing, analytics, and operations can improve on an existing game concept. Or just give them the firepower to beat out the original game, depending on how you look at it.
I want to hear your thoughts: Should game companies be encouraged or punished for taking the best ideas from other games? Where do you draw the line between inspiration and duplication? Sound off in the comments.
This frustrates me so much because Tiny Tower is one of the only games I have continued to play without losing interest. It’s so simplistic in requiring no particular devotion of time, so for smart phone addicts like me who still need to be productive with their day, it is perfect! So while this imitation doesn’t surprise me, the only way I think Zynga or other companies should be allowed to “be inspired” in a way that is near to flat out duplication is if they add some major functional change. Angry Birds put a new spin and story on an old game. At the very least Zynga should be made to prove a significant change, otherwise I hope everyone sees it as a rip off and rejects it. Hopefully in high school English class you were taught plagiarism is greatly frowned upon. You avoid this by reflecting what you’ve learned in your work and doing so in your own way. I believe the same concept goes for games.
I think it’s very hard to draw a line, and I think there’s sufficient legal protections for the most egregious cases. Is it morally or ethically the same when a small company copies a big company game as when a big company copies a game from a small developer? I think people will vote with their dollars, ultimately, and companies that don’t put sufficient creativity into their games will will have some reputation problems that may actually affect sales to some extent.
Hey Steve, great reply that echoes what I’m hearing around the game industry. However, I think the “beef” here, so to speak, is that the majority of gamers (the uninformed masses, if you will) vote with their dollars for the clone that has the biggest marketing organization behind it. Discovery is a huge problem for app developers, especially indies, and so a developer that has their game copied by Zynga can usually do little more than cringe as they are outspent 10:1 on marketing. To be fair, Zynga has made significant strides on the game analytics side that enable it to afford these massive marketing campaigns, but there is something to said for the substantial advantages of scale they enjoy. Our hope is that by increasing CLV (via real-money gaming), indie game studios will then have the firepower to attract the users their game deserves.