EA looks to make Zynga bleed for cloning creative products
A few years back, very few people would have doubted the ability of Zynga to become the most dominant force in social gaming. Today, everyone is wondering just how long the social games maker will be able to survive.
The immense popularity of the social network website Facebook created a perfect opportunity for developers to reach out to a global audience with very little effort. It was not too hard to guess that people were bored and searching for an activity to do
and while interacting with friends was entertaining enough, there was a desire for more.
Zynga not only realised the huge void in terms of entertainment that remained to be filled on Facebook, but also showed great presence of mind by coming up with a form of entertainment that could cater to people of all ages. Thus began the era of FarmVille,
CityVille and other such games.
Everything seemed to be moving smooth for the San Francisco-based studio as their global fan base continued to grow in numbers.
There were a few hiccups along the way as a few studios rose up against the social game maker, alleging that the latter had violated copyright laws by cloning their intellectual property (IP) and simply changed the name before presenting it to the public
as a new IP.
Zynga however managed to walk away from these allegations without sustaining any serious harm owing to the lack of resources the complaining studios had to put up a solid fight. There was simply no stopping the growing popularity of the makers of FarmVille.
However, it seems that the company got a bit carried away with the strategy of copying and reproducing someone else IP.
A few months back, Zynga released its latest game The Ville, which caught the attention of Electronic Arts (EA). The reason for this was not because the game was extremely enticing, which it probably is, but because of the blatant similarities between it
and the company’s own IP The Sims Social which It had released just over a year ago. There were simply too many similarities between the two games for EA to remain silent and therefore it decided to take a strict action against Zynga, filing a lawsuit against
the latter for copyright infringement.
EA claims that by turning its legal cannons in the direction of the social game maker, it is not only fighting for its own creative product, i.e. The Sims Social, but is also taking a stand on behalf of other creative studios who require the resources to
safeguard their creative content from getting cloned.
The general manager of Maxis Lucy Bradshaw wrote on a blog that the company is acting on behalf of the entire industry.
“Maxis isn’t the first studio to claim that Zynga copied its creative product,” read the blog post by Bradshaw. “But we are the studio that has the financial and corporate resources to stand up and do something about it. Infringing a developer’s copyright
is not an acceptable practice in game development. By calling Zynga out on this illegal practice, we hope to have a secondary effect of protecting the rights of other creative studios who don’t have the resources to protect themselves.”
Zynga has responded to the allegations, stating that the accusations are baseless and that it will indeed protect itself in court. It has further clarified that irrespective of what EA claim, The Ville had not stolen any elements from The Sims Social but
had instead taken inspiration from its own previous games such as FarmVille, CityVille, etc.
The whole industry is showing a lot of interest in the case, as the verdict is expected to impact more than just the two parties involved in it.
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