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[Neonivek]

This is good.  I will be paying attention to this.  It amuses me.

Well it is evil versus evil.

How often does that happen?

[alway]

A buyout would be pretty much impossible. Any bean counter worth their salt could tell you Zynga's stock is still overpriced; until and unless they create a more sustainable business model, they will be all but gone 10 years from now.

[Girlinhat]

10 years from now.

You're being optimistic.  Zynga is trying to appeal to a very simple audience - that article itself shows things like Bingo and Bejeweled level of gaming.  Which is fine, to each there own and every market is a profitable market, except that they're doing so by stealing other games.

It's sort of like if you tried to shoplift from Walmart, and then sat outside their front door and sold the items to people walking in.  Walmart and/or EA will kick your ass.

[Megaman]

If EA is Walmart, Zynga's main business was doing such a thing to gypsies then.

[Geen]

All in favor of grabbing some popcorn and watching the forces of evil fighting among themselves?

[Neonivek]

Zynga has MORE then enough money to happily pay up if they lose this lawsuit.

They are actually more efficient then EA when it comes to making money. (In that Zynga spends almost next to no money developing their games, and gets a TON of cash back)

[Knight of Fools]

They sure chose a bad company to copy from. Zynga may have a lot of cash, but compared with EA, their life savings is what EA makes in a day. For once, I'm rooting for EA. If there's anyone out there I'd like to see get slammed more than anyone else, it's Zynga.

Best case scenario: Zynga pays up all the money they've made on their copy and more, and it gets shut down hard. Once precedence is set, more of their games follow suit. Once Farmville stops making them money, they go bankrupt and are immediately exiled to Antarctica.

Edit: Solid legal analysis herein.

Double Edit: Same website, but apparently Zynga's been going through rough times, too. Things aren't looking good for the King of Copy.

[Muz]

Lol, I expected at least one post by someone who opposes patents or something saying that suing people for copying is evil

But this is almost just blatant photocopy. Someone invited me to play The Ville earlier, I actually thought it was some kind of expansion for the Sims because of how exactly similar they looked. They've got plenty of money, it's not like they can't hire a proper designer. They just probably took a dumb family member to copy someone else's designs. Or they stifled the creative process by trying to imitate success.

Zynga actually did have some innovation early on, back when they were one of the earliest to fully implement the "spam or pay to continue" model. I actually blame them for all the Facebook games being so shitty; they proved that you can make a lot of money by annoying people into buying your products.

While EA just makes bad games I don't have to play, Zynga popularized a horrible business model.

[ank]

This is what i feel like about this:
a Meh company is suing another Meh company, over Meh games....
Meh...

[Dariush]

Serves Zynga right, dem greedy casual-appealing fucktards.

[fenrif]

Yeah Zynga is way worse! Remember when they bought out all those classic gaming studios and then ran them into the ground? And how they now own the rights to some of gamings most beloved franchises and only roll them out as generic FPS games with no hint of the old magic? And how they actively work agains their own customers rights? And how that whole "zynga_spouse" thing worked out with them forcing their employees to work 7 days a week 13 hours a day.

[Dariush]

"zynga_spouse thing"?

[MorleyDev]

Is it possible for both of them to lose?

Yeah Zynga is way worse! Remember when they bought out all those classic gaming studios and then ran them into the ground? And how they now own the rights to some of gamings most beloved franchises and only roll them out as generic FPS games with no hint of the old magic? And how they actively work agains their own customers rights? And how that whole "zynga_spouse" thing worked out with them forcing their employees to work 7 days a week 13 hours a day.

Remember when EA gave it's employees stock options, only to then demand they give that stock back or be fired. Remember when EA made their money from scamming their customers directly and indirectly by deliberately working with known scam advertising companies? EA may be a bad games company, but Zynga is arguably a worse company full stop.

[ansontan2000]

Oh look, the titan that is EA decided to do something besides wringing money out of it's "fans" forever.
Instead, they're taking out an even bigger evil.
I don't believe I'm saying this, but....GO EA!

[Microcline]

Yeah Zynga is way worse! Remember when they bought out all those classic gaming studios and then ran them into the ground? And how they now own the rights to some of gamings most beloved franchises and only roll them out as generic FPS games with no hint of the old magic? And how they actively work agains their own customers rights? And how that whole "zynga_spouse" thing worked out with them forcing their employees to work 7 days a week 13 hours a day.

Remember when EA gave it's employees stock options, only to then demand they give that stock back or be fired. Remember when EA made their money from scamming their customers directly and indirectly by deliberately working with known scam advertising companies? EA may be a bad games company, but Zynga is arguably a worse company full stop.

It seems to be the classic argument of scale, which boils down to the old deontological vs consequentialist debate.  EA is larger, and thus able to commit crimes of a greater magnitude and have a larger negative effect on the entertainment software industry, while Zynga has taken more unconscionable actions but at a smaller scale.

We should probably stop trying to measure who has the biggest evil dick and celebrate that two dying monsters are preying on each other.