Two of the industry's biggest companies are set to square off in court as Electronic Arts has filed a lawsuit alleging that Zynga's Facebook title The Ville has "copied and misappropriated" elements of EA-published Facebook game The Sims Social. Since its initial reveal, The Ville has been summed up by many as Zynga's version of The Sims; whether that is an oversimplification will be a matter for the courts to decide. For now, we get to ponder the implications of two of the most maligned companies in the industry -- Zynga is often derided for copying others' games and failing to innovate, among other things, while EA's business tactics landed it the unofficial distinction of being America's worst company earlier this year -- facing off against each other.
To say Zynga has been having some issues as of late would be an understatement. Its stock has been in decline for most of the year and was subjected to another nosedive just over a week ago; this came on the heels of a poor quarter that resulted in COO John Schappert being replaced as head of game development. And with the company doing so poorly on the stock market, it is now facing a class action lawsuit which alleges executives knew of an impending crash that prompted them to sell in excess of $500 million in stock earlier this year.
That all leads us today, when EA filed its complaint (via Kotaku) with a United States District Court in California. Accompanying this was a message from Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of The Sims developer Maxis. Noting that The Sims Social was released on Facebook in August 2011 and The Ville in June 2012, she claims "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."
She goes on to say, "This is a case of principle," before highlighting the fact that this is not the first time such a claim has been directed at Zynga. Back in January, its iOS game Dream Heights caught flak for allegedly stealing from an existing game, Tiny Tower. It was not just fans and the media, but Tiny Tower developer NimbleBit (a company Zynga attempted but failed to acquire) who called attention to this. Zynga's defense was that Tiny Tower had been inspired by previous titles and was not the originator of the genre, though NimbleBit countered by wondering why certain elements -- the number of business types, how many people can fit in a single apartment or work at one store, etc. -- were identical between the two games.
Going back even further, Zynga's earlier games also attracted allegations of copyright infringement, FarmVille (with Farm Town) and Mafia Wars (with Mob Wars) being two of the most well-known examples. EA's complaint lists many of these alleged copycats, even going so far as to include screenshot comparisons of FarmVille and Farm Town, Tiny Tower and Dream Heights, and Bingo Blitz and Zynga Bingo.
Zynga is no stranger to litigation, although more than once in the past it has been in the position EA now is. It filed a lawsuit against Brazilian social game company Vostu last year for copyright infringement on a number of its games. Then this past May, it filed a complaint over another company releasing a Facebook game called PyramidVille, which it felt was too similar to its own line of "-Ville" games. Zynga does not own a trademark on the word "Ville."
In addition to listing the other allegations of Zynga's copycatting ways, much of EA's complaint was centered around outlining how The Ville cribs from The Sims Social. "The Ville was not an attempt to innovate on a game concept -- it was an intentional effort to copy EA's creative work," it reads in part. "Not only does The Ville blatantly mimic the entire framework and style of gameplay in The Sims Social, but it so closely copies the original, creative expression and unique elements of The Sims Social -- i.e., the animation sequences, visual arrangements, characters' motions and actions, and other unique audio-visual elements -- that the two games are nearly indistinguishable."
The case EA tries to build includes an explanation of Zynga's business practices (including CEO Mark Pincus' infamous 'I don't want innovation' quote), mentions of the EA staff Zynga poached (including Schappert), quotes from the media noting similarities between the two games, a long list of comparisons of the two, and screenshots highlighting the seemingly identical elements in the two games. (Funnily enough, one set of screenshots is actually labeled backwards.) Perhaps the most damning of the comparisons that something from The Sims Social was copied by The Ville are the skin tones; all eight in both games have identical RGB values, which dictate the amount of red, green, and blue used to generate a color. With there being in excess of 16.7 million possible RGB values, it's hard to disagree with the complaint's assertion that "[t]here is an infinitesimally small chance that the use of the same RGB values for skin tone in The Ville as The Sims Social is mere coincidence."
The timing of this lawsuit is sure to raise some eyebrows. Zynga is facing the insider trading class-action lawsuit and struggling to adjust as Facebook policy changes have hurt the popularity of its games. Its high-priced acquisition of OMGPOP has turned out to be less of a success than it hoped with Draw Something's massive popularity proving to have been a flash in the pan. With its future uncertain, today's announcement may have had a small negative impact on Zynga's share price, which currently sits at $2.72 (down from a high of $2.86 today), though it's the long-term effects this lawsuit could have that are more significant.
EA's position toward Zynga has changed recently, first with Peter Moore actually commenting on the company (EA has avoided discussing it publicly in the past) and now with this lawsuit. In most cases like this you would expect a settlement to be reached before it ends up in court, but one has to wonder if EA isn't intent on forcing the issue and fighting this out in court while Zynga is down in the ditch.
Bradshaw's statement on the suit made it sound if part of EA's motivation for engaging in litigation was somewhat altruistic: "Maxis isn't the first studio to claim that Zynga copied its creative product. 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."
Whether you believe it's fighting this case on behalf of others or not, EA is putting itself in a position to benefit from the good will that comes along with targeting a hated entity. While many gamers dislike both companies, the popular opinion among many is that Zynga doesn't make "real games," which can't be said of EA, even if it is often criticized for the way it handles the shutdown of online servers and downloadable content, its use of online passes, its annualization of franchises like Madden, and so on.
This isn't the first time EA has entered litigation (supposedly) on behalf of the industry, either; it did the same in 2009 with Tim Langdell, who was a notorious trademark troll that went after anyone who dared make use of the word "edge."
Unlike that situation, this Zynga case could prove to be a much bigger deal for gamers, and I'm personally happy to see this issue being addressed in such a direct manner. Far too often we see social and mobile games released that mimic an existing game and offer nothing new; that certainly felt like the case with Dream Heights. In that case, Zynga game design chief Brian Reynolds talked about using something more akin to a web model where you get a game up and running and then innovate on it, something this continues to strike me as a poor approach. The baseline for release should not be copying everything your competition does and nothing more.
Whatever the outcome of this lawsuit -- and I fully expect EA to see it through rather than settle -- it will hopefully encourage developers, Zynga included, to be more careful about how they draw their inspiration from other games. Social and mobile games, for whatever reason, seem to lift from each another much more readily and blatantly than in the traditional games space. That's not to say it never happens with standard games, but it usually feels less blatant, and it's usually with good ideas; Insomniac, for instance, would have been wise to abandon the energy system used in all of Zynga's games when developing Outernauts.
Zynga has, thus far, only released a short statement calling the lawsuit "unfortunate" and claiming EA "clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic copyright principles. It's also ironic that EA brings this suit shortly after launching SimCity Social which bears an uncanny resemblance to Zynga's CityVille game." There are certainly similarities between the two, but considering Zynga wrote off NimbleBit's complaints by noting SimTower predated Tiny Tower, it seems as if Zynga's knock on SimCity Social could be dismissed by bringing up the fact that the original SimCity was released in 1989.
If nothing else, any upcoming games from Zynga are sure to receive even more scrutiny than usual; it should be interesting to see if the company puts extra effort in trying to differentiate its upcoming games from any already on the market that it could be accused of copying.
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