EA Sues Zynga for Copying The Sims Social
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Yeah, if EA actually wins this, it'll be really troubling for the industry as a whole. The end result of cloning lawsuits like this wouldn't be trying to take out clones, it would be simply another means to stifle competition. If you're EA and you want to stop, say, an independent developer from releasing a game, you simply find a similar title in your ridiculously massive back catalog and sue them for "cloning" that.
Once you've opened up the lawsuit, they find they're out of funds before they leave the discovery phase, and then it's your game, what you want them to settle for. You can force them to shut down, that's easy, but you could also force them to hand over the game to you first, so now that independent game is your game, to do whatever you want with, and the developers are now forced to sign non-compete contracts, or you drag their ass into court for the next four years until you've bleed as much as you can from this stone.
In a more realistic scenario, consider Torchlight II and Diablo 3, while they're very different games, they could be visually similar enough for Activision to go after the Torchlight devs (or would have been able to before Perfect World snapped them up), based on the visual similarity of the games. And they might have actually been able to go after the original Torchlight based on it's mechanical similarity to the original Diablo.
As much as everyone hates Zynga, this is a really really bad situation all around.
Once you've opened up the lawsuit, they find they're out of funds before they leave the discovery phase, and then it's your game, what you want them to settle for. You can force them to shut down, that's easy, but you could also force them to hand over the game to you first, so now that independent game is your game, to do whatever you want with, and the developers are now forced to sign non-compete contracts, or you drag their ass into court for the next four years until you've bleed as much as you can from this stone.
In a more realistic scenario, consider Torchlight II and Diablo 3, while they're very different games, they could be visually similar enough for Activision to go after the Torchlight devs (or would have been able to before Perfect World snapped them up), based on the visual similarity of the games. And they might have actually been able to go after the original Torchlight based on it's mechanical similarity to the original Diablo.
As much as everyone hates Zynga, this is a really really bad situation all around.
"Imaginativate" is now my new favorite word for "copy 95% of."Krion_Vark said:
Vrach said:
Zynga, uh... hasn't been doing so awesome [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/118723-Zynga-Share-Price-Crashes], financially speaking.Brotherofwill said:
EDIT:
While that's a valid concern, keep in mind that if Activision actually tried to pull something like that, it has about five major competitors that would be more than happy to sue it into oblivion for its own games. Sharing a few mechanics or a vaguely similar art style is nowhere near the level of copying that Zynga is accused of. In fact, EA probably has a hard legal battle ahead of it in spite of the unending list of similarities between the games in question - even if it wins, it will likely be a narrow enough victory that it doesn't establish legal precedent for punishing games that clearly do iterate on their predecessors. That depends on the judge who writes the ruling, though.Starke said:
Starke said:
All plots to all the stories, movies, games, etc etc, fall into no more than 7 categories. Dig deep enough and its all the same, but in this case its not a case of just two similar ideas for Simulated worlds, this is a near perfect copy paste, which is bad. Its like creating the Mona Lisa only with eyebrows.
The problem is of course, creating a legal precedent to do so. Again, we've already seen, this year, people trying to shake down others through the court system with the Assassins Creed thing. Now, when it's copying someone's story, the courts have a lot of experience, but when the accusation is copying someone else's game, that, not so much.Noble_Lance said:
You can say "nothing is original, everything is derivative" all you want, but the fact of the matter is, this isn't about everything being the same. It's about the danger of publishers having more control over what can and can't come to market.
Yeah...Zanez said:
SCS is just Sim City with all the boring Facebook Tropes latched on. The similarities between it and city ville are more because City Ville is Sim City with all the boring Facebook Tropes latched on and not because SCS copied them
.But regardless, not a fan of Zynga, EA's social gaming support team is nothing to praise however.
Yeah, good move EA. Kick em while their down. Destroy the company that was abandoned by their upper management, you know the people that likely told the rest of the company to rip off every game ever.
Yes it's nice to see Zynga being called out on their utter BS. No it's not nice that it is being done by EA right after Zynga took a massive hit to their stock options and losing some of the people at the top of the Zynga corporate ladder.
Yes it's nice to see Zynga being called out on their utter BS. No it's not nice that it is being done by EA right after Zynga took a massive hit to their stock options and losing some of the people at the top of the Zynga corporate ladder.
Battlefield and Modern Warfare are night and day, except for the close quarters expansion for battlefield I guess (and the singleplayer)Litchhunter said:
I know, isn't it great!? Let's hope they bleed out entirely.Fappy said:
I don't consider Zynga's business methods ethical, so I don't recognize their profits or even their existence to be legitimate. Thus I'd really like to see them die out.
Though both games suck anyway.
I just want to see the evidence that gets brought up at trial. For example, it's quite likely that we're going to see internal Zynga emails that say, "Let's copy Mob Wars," or, "Let's copy Tiny Tower." Specifically, they'll introduce one that says, "Let's copy The Sims Social," but it would really behoove them to introduce as many of these emails as they can, because it establishes a pattern. Juries and judges love patterns. But that's beside the point.
No single judgment can really bring Zynga down, not even when that judgment is on behalf of a company as large as EA on a license as large as The Sims. Tens of millions of dollars, tops. Zynga has $1.2 billion in cash and short-term investments (EA only has about twice that, actually). However, if evidence is introduced that functions as an admission of guilt with regard to copying games and EA wins... there's a lot of lawyers who would take cases from small development houses whose games have been cloned and do the cases on retainer, because there's already evidence and precedent.
As it stands, Zynga's been working on three unprofitable quarters, a potential lawsuit over a stock sale by Zynga officers and directors, and the COO got removed from his position last week. I wouldn't say the company's in free-fall, but they've got the 'chute on and are staring out the door of the airplane. Again, however, a lawsuit -even one from a company as big as EA- isn't going to kill Zynga (unfortunately). Their operating losses just aren't enough at the moment to cause the company to crumble under the weight of lawsuits, much as I might like to see that happen.
At first I saw this as being a quagmire like the Apple v. Microsoft "look and feel" case from 1994, but that was a case in which Apple was asserting claims over ideas (not copyrightable) rather than expression (which is copyrightable). In short, EA can't really copyright a city-building game or an anthropomorphized Tamagotchi (which The Sims functionally is). But expression being copyrightable, all you have to do is look at the expressions of the Sims characters versus the characters from The Ville (these pictures are available in the text of EA's filed complaint, which is eminently readable by anyone even without a legal background), and you'll see that those expressions are near-identical. Yes, I'm getting a bit literal with the "expressions" thing, but it fits especially well in this case.
No single judgment can really bring Zynga down, not even when that judgment is on behalf of a company as large as EA on a license as large as The Sims. Tens of millions of dollars, tops. Zynga has $1.2 billion in cash and short-term investments (EA only has about twice that, actually). However, if evidence is introduced that functions as an admission of guilt with regard to copying games and EA wins... there's a lot of lawyers who would take cases from small development houses whose games have been cloned and do the cases on retainer, because there's already evidence and precedent.
As it stands, Zynga's been working on three unprofitable quarters, a potential lawsuit over a stock sale by Zynga officers and directors, and the COO got removed from his position last week. I wouldn't say the company's in free-fall, but they've got the 'chute on and are staring out the door of the airplane. Again, however, a lawsuit -even one from a company as big as EA- isn't going to kill Zynga (unfortunately). Their operating losses just aren't enough at the moment to cause the company to crumble under the weight of lawsuits, much as I might like to see that happen.
At first I saw this as being a quagmire like the Apple v. Microsoft "look and feel" case from 1994, but that was a case in which Apple was asserting claims over ideas (not copyrightable) rather than expression (which is copyrightable). In short, EA can't really copyright a city-building game or an anthropomorphized Tamagotchi (which The Sims functionally is). But expression being copyrightable, all you have to do is look at the expressions of the Sims characters versus the characters from The Ville (these pictures are available in the text of EA's filed complaint, which is eminently readable by anyone even without a legal background), and you'll see that those expressions are near-identical. Yes, I'm getting a bit literal with the "expressions" thing, but it fits especially well in this case.