Electronic Arts sues Zynga over The Ville – Video Games Update
Zynga is infamous throughout the Video games industry for notoriously blatantly ripping off other Intellectual Properties (IPs) but have gotten away with it until now.
Plagiarism has been a common practice in the video games industry and seems to go generally unpunished until now. Electronic Arts (EA) has sued the Facebook Social Gaming publisher, Zynga, over its latest rip off of the Sims.
The Sims, even though a casual game, is one of the most popular PC franchise owned by EA. Ever since the launch of the first game in 2000, the franchise has sold over 68.58 million units across various platforms. The Sims 2 is at the top of the best selling
PC games of all time, with over 20 million copies shipped. It’s followed by the original Sims at second place with over sixteen million copies sold.
“The Ville was introduced in June 2012, the infringement of The Sims Social was unmistakable to those of us at Maxis as well as to players and the industry at large. The similarities go well beyond any superficial resemblance. Zynga's design choices, animations,
visual arrangements and character motions and actions have been directly lifted from The Sims Social. The copying was so comprehensive that the two games are, to an uninitiated observer, largely indistinguishable. Scores of media and bloggers commented on
the blatant mimicry,” stated EA’s Lucy Bradshaw in a statement regarding the upcoming lawsuit.
Bradshaw also stated that normally Zynga would get away with blatant plagiarism because most of the IPs that it rips off are owned by small indie developers who don’t have the resources to take the giant social gaming company to court, but EA is determined
to protect its IPs and has decided to call Zynga out over its unethical and most likely illegal practices. EA also hopes that this will set a new precedent which will decrease the amount of plagiarism in the industry.
Whatever the decision may be, one thing is for certain, EA has picked the best time to take Zynga to court since the company is already facing a financial crisis in the stock market and this might just be the final push needed to take the Social gaming giant
down.
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