If you use Facebook with any regularity, hell, even if you don’t, you’ll likely have heard of Farmville or Mafia Wars and their creator: Zynga.
Now, to anyone who’s been keeping up with Zynga related news over the past couple of years, things like them pissing off the city of San Francisco, getting sued by rival company Digital Chocolate over copyright/trademark claims for Mafia Wars, the CEO admitting that most users were scammed in some way and even drawing the ire of the Norwegians for breaches of their Data Protection Act, are all old news.
But I was poking about Escapist last night, when I saw the headline “Indy dev calls Zynga out over plagiarism” (sic). Intrigued as I usually am by such things, I clicked and read the article.
According to said article, Zynga recently released a title called “Dream Heights”, which bears more than just a passing resemblance to Nimblebit’s hit iOS game: “Tiny Tower”, differences in graphical styles notwithstanding. Having looked at images myself, it does indeed look remarkably similar, so much so, in fact, that I would go so far as to say “damn near identical”.
In response to the game’s release, the 3 man Nimblebit team released the following image on Twitter:
That…was pretty bloody awesome actually. Nimblebit, you have my respect. Obviously, this is a far cry from actually suing them, but I doubt Nimblebit has the financial clout to go up against Zynga at this juncture. Still, damned funny though.
Primary Sources: Escapist, Twitter
Other sources: Escapist, Escapist, Escapist and Forbrukerportalen, in that order.
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