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[Zangi]

Apparently, Zynga has around 1.5 Billion in cash reserves... well, I guess they are still too cheap to raise wages?


And huh... reading my last post there, something seems off with it... more of a grammar/word flow thing.  Posting too early in the morning...

[Shadowlord]

That just means EA will be able to loot more of their money (while standing over their corpse).

At some point, you start hoping Zynga loses most of their money, but that EA doesn't get it, which would have to mean it would go to the lawyers, which inspires feelings of 

The government should just take both parties' money and reinvest it in something worthwhile, like an experiment to see how much carbon dioxide we actually have to pump into the atmosphere to make the oceans start boiling. For !!Science!!.

[kingfisher1112]

Welp, damn. GO EA!!!!

[hachnslay]

... and after they scrap the EA IP stuff they will clone other companie's IP like ... oh no ...

regardless, before this thread i didn't know who Zynga was, so i read the average public opinion on them ...
it scares me a little.

... on a side note, the wikipedia article has 99 ocurences of the wordpart ville...

[ductape]

I think the best part is that EA held onto their hand until Zynga actually made enough money before springing the case, that way they stand to profit more. So ruthless, gotta love American capitalism!

"No sense in suing a little nothing company over our IP, let's wait and see if they get up into the billions, THEN we sue them!"

[TempAcc]

Thats just sound legal advice.Those lawyers are doing their job properly, they deserve the ridiculous ammount of money they'll get are gaining from this. By allowing zynga's capital growbefore taking significant legal action, EA's lawyers guaranteed their client would be able to gain an appropriate and satisfactory compensation for the monetary damage Zynga's actions caused.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   I'm just going to come from a programmers view and say in this case Zynga is the greater of the 2 evils. People have been talking about things like copyrights and cost of an idea and all that but most of the arguments are missing one very important thing about video games. Its not the idea that is expensive, its the turning an idea into a program that is. Every one of you probably has a couple of ideas for games and every programmer who ever wanted to make a game has many more. Ideas are a dime a dozen in the game industry. Its the taking a good idea and making it into a game that makes it worth something and to have a company like Zynga steal something right down to the RGB values for skin tones  means they are from my view purely evil.
   Lets put this more into something we can understand better, what if someone tried to copy Dwarf Fortress? Do you honestly think they could come up with anything near it just from the ideas? No it would take years just like DF did but if they stole code then anything is possible. Now while I have no feelings for EA(I don't even want to waste hate on them), they spent a lot of time and money in developing their game, probably more then Zynga has spent on their copy even when counting advertising.  Now while EA may have more money so they can afford it but look at every other game Zynga has copied, they all where basically delivered a death sentence because of what Zynga did.

[Sensei]

This is basically all you need to take away from the wiki article:

On March 21, 2012, Zynga announced they purchased the game company OMGPOP for $180 million,[31] therein acquiring the game Draw Something.[32] A noticeable drop in popularity was noted following the acquisition, as daily active users dropped from 15 million to 10 million in the first month post-acquisition.

[Zangi]

This is basically all you need to take away from the wiki article:

On March 21, 2012, Zynga announced they purchased the game company OMGPOP for $180 million,[31] therein acquiring the game Draw Something.[32] A noticeable drop in popularity was noted following the acquisition, as daily active users dropped from 15 million to 10 million in the first month post-acquisition.

With the benefit of doubt, it could mean that people were bored of it within that month?  (I don't know what Zynga changed after the takeover.)

[Omegameep]

This is basically all you need to take away from the wiki article:

On March 21, 2012, Zynga announced they purchased the game company OMGPOP for $180 million,[31] therein acquiring the game Draw Something.[32] A noticeable drop in popularity was noted following the acquisition, as daily active users dropped from 15 million to 10 million in the first month post-acquisition.

With the benefit of doubt, it could mean that people were bored of it within that month?  (I don't know what Zynga changed after the takeover.)

Maybe both, guess some people know whats going to happen when Zynga get its hand on it.

[Megaman]

I still don't know what the hell Zynga was thinking. They copied from a company that is more than happy to pound others into the dust when they're NOT being threatened.

[Rose]

This is gonna be great.

[Flare]

Look at it this way: am I more willing to develop something if I have to put up my own money, even with patents and copyright, when there is a chance I might fail, or am I more willing to develop something that might fail if I'm guaranteed to get paid some sum right now to do the development work.

I think you might be focusing on the wrong group here, it's not necessarily the writers that have to worry about costs, but the investors. Put it to you this way, would it be the case that investors are more willing to give money to an artist when they don't own the distribution rights over the work, or when they can only benefit it for their own usage or simply wait until their competition makes something similar and copy that?
For very small projects this would work, but not something that incurs the cost of an entire studio of people who work day in and out.

As for kickstarter, I don't think people would be satisfied if they actually knew what they could be doing with the money. As a whole I think people who give money on kickstarter need a bit of collective work. They could demand far more than what the developers are offering them. For example, given a choice between giving money and simply getting the game when it's out, and giving money as an investment, receiving partial ownership of the rights to the game itself and get the game as well, I think the majority of them would be going for the second option instead.

The part about the risks being moved onto the commissioners instead I do think supports this. They would be far more unwilling to invest in things particularly if the costs of high. Yes, the risks would be shifted onto them, but they too recognize this. For any project that involves more than the employment of 50 skilled people over a long period of time a lot of investors would shy away if the only thing that they got in return for giving these people a lot of money is that they get to use the end product, or when a small set of inventors require a lot of expensive custom built machinery or rare materials on top of their skilled man-hours to just produce a prototype that other people who have not put in the same amount of money can just rip off. You've shifted the risk to the commissioners yes, but you have not solved the problem, you've merely shifted it onto someone else, and therein lies the same bottleneck you're trying to clear up.

[Aklyon]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120919/19282120439/zynga-fires-back-ea-with-claims-innocence-accusations-wrongdoing-eas-part.shtml

News on this has appeared again.

[Akura]

Reading that, I think Zynga doesn't really have a chance. Then I again, I never really thought they ever did.