Tiny Tower Devs Suggest Zynga Really, Really Loves Tiny Tower

Add another one to the "Zynga copycats" list:

its a menu based game.....100% technical qualities.

it's pretty easy to know if youve ripped off a menu based game. making the graphics ridiculously similar is just a slap in the face

@Deathpooky said:

@thabigred: The point is that this isn't Saints Row building on GTA. Saints Row had a different world, character, side missions, and the rest. Same with Darksiders being a copy of Zelda design, where it created something new and different, incorporated new concepts, and improved on others. This is if you copied an entire novel wholesale and changed the title and names of the characters. Or if you made a game called Smario Brothers that used the exact same mechanics and levels as SMB, only with palette swaps for the plumbers and enemies.

Copying format or genre and building your own game is great, usually leads to cheap imitations but often leads to great innovation and competition. Copying an entire game, every single game mechanic and idea, only with different art assets, is plagiarism and helps no-one. With everything there's a line and they crossed it.

Put another way, I don't think Nimblebit has ownership of "tower sim game." But "Tower Sim game where you move in characters in floors of five, they work up to three in a store, there are five kinds of stores, the characters have attributes that determine how well they work at the store, having more characters working at the store lets you build more items at that store, you use an upgradable elevator to move people into floors and up into the tower, money gradually accrues over time at stores with products available, and the goal is to earn enough money to build a new floor"? They may not have the rights to that, but if someone makes that exact game and adds nothing to it, then yeah, that's wrong.

They basically went "hey that game is popular, let's make that exact game as closely as possible without getting sued for copyright infringement." Not "hey that game is popular, lets make a game like that one."

The problem is that Nimblebit didn't have to work that hard to come up with the original idea to begin with so imitation comes with the territory. When the cost of developing a product is dirt cheap(it only took 3 dudes to make Tiny Tower) and imitation is so easy, you better fucking expect that companies will take advantage of that. It happens in every industry, and frankly it's better for consumers so I don't give a fuck.

There is nothing wrong with giving consumers more choice because at the end of the day. Saints Row 1 was just a complete derivative of GTA San Andreas. Yes they did add nuances but at it's core they were imitating that shit like crazy. Saints Row 1 sells great, 2 sells better and then we get the Third which has gone so far in it's own direction that it's no longer derivative and deserves a nod to being an innovator. To get to the point of being an innovator, Volition needed to have it's time imitating GTA.

That's how economics works. When companies are no longer competing on price it's all about making things better for consumers. It's not a given that Zynga will get to that point, but let consumers decide. At the end of the day, this isn't plagiarism. Dudes had to develop completely new art assets, they had to program this shit, and it cost money to do all these things. End of story, consumers win out in this, both companies are making money, nobody is losing out, who gives a fuck?

Gameloft anyone?

Normally I would say something along the lines of "Simpson's did it", but if you look at the picture they basically took everything and put up a new title screen. Their UI is slightly different. That's pretty shitty.

@ryguy777 said:

At the end of the day people will play what they feel is the better of these two games. It seems to me that if NimbleBit has made a solid game then they shouldn't need to worry about some hot turd Zynga drops out of its smelly ass taking their customers away. The best way to secure their position is to make the better product.

But seriously, microtransactions can go eat a shit as far as i'm concerned. I waste alot of money on dumb shit but I gotta draw the line somewhere.

Though the Zynga thing rubs me the wrong way, I can concede to this point.

Zynga's game's art style looks very busy/messy and Tiny Tower's charm is in its simple art style and very clear UI for communicating all of the information you need to know.

I've been "playing" Tiny Tower for a little while now and the microtransactions are not a required part of it. I don't intend to spend a cent on it.

Tiny Tower is not a blatant clone of SimTower. Inspired by SimTower? Maybe. Other than building stores and condos in a 2-D skyscraper, they're pretty different games. Zynga's game is a blatant Tiny Tower clone. They didn't even try to hide it. Different graphics, but the entire layout is exactly the same. Not a lawyer, but one would assume that Zynga's game is so similar that NimbleBit would at least have grounds for a lawsuit (if they're willing/able to take the financial risk).

And some commenters mentioned micro transactions. You still earn "bux" normally by doing various tasks in the game. You just have to be a little patient for some of the bigger purchases, like elevator upgrades. I haven't found anything you can't do in Tiny Tower without micro transactions. The only remotely annoying thing in the game is that on load, you sometimes get a message about other NimbleBit games. But you just click "no thanks" and go about playing. Yes, it's an ad, but it's unobtrusive and easily dismissed. I don't have much experience with other freemium games, but what I have seen is much more annoying.

At first I was like, "well maybe this is like when Doom came out and all anyone did was create Doom clones"

Except "first person shooter" eventually became a genre. I don't see tower building sim eventually becoming a genre. But I could be wrong I guess.

Look, regardless, there's taking inspiration and there's doing your own thing and then there's plagiarism. I think it's about time this industry started to think about separating all those ideas or we're going to be in a real pickle one of these days.

@thabigred: The point is that this isn't Saints Row building on GTA. Saints Row had a different world, character, side missions, and the rest. Same with Darksiders being a copy of Zelda design, where it created something new and different, incorporated new concepts, and improved on others. This is if you copied an entire novel wholesale and changed the title and names of the characters. Or if you made a game called Smario Brothers that used the exact same mechanics and levels as SMB, only with palette swaps for the plumbers and enemies.

Copying format or genre and building your own game is great, usually leads to cheap imitations but often leads to great innovation and competition. Copying an entire game, every single game mechanic and idea, only with different art assets, is plagiarism and helps no-one. With everything there's a line and they crossed it.

Put another way, I don't think Nimblebit has ownership of "tower sim game." But "Tower Sim game where you move in characters in floors of five, they work up to three in a store, there are five kinds of stores, the characters have attributes that determine how well they work at the store, having more characters working at the store lets you build more items at that store, you use an upgradable elevator to move people into floors and up into the tower, money gradually accrues over time at stores with products available, and the goal is to earn enough money to build a new floor"? They may not have the rights to that, but if someone makes that exact game and adds nothing to it, then yeah, that's wrong.

They basically went "hey that game is popular, let's make that exact game as closely as possible without getting sued for copyright infringement." Not "hey that game is popular, lets make a game like that one."

@wewantsthering: I agree its a long stretch. Point is, every game is copying/building etc... from all other previous games in the genre. Yes this happens to be a particularly blatent case, but its the way the industry works there little use crying over it.

As an aside, go to the description of SimTower on the GB wiki. Now read the first couple lines but instead of SimTower say Tiny Tower. Granted, the very niche realm of "tower sims" means they are all going to be very similar, but the description just fits so well.

ah zynga,

the only company worse than game loft.

I interviewed Ian Marsh a few months ago for a regular feature on mobile developers. Seemed like a nice bloke. It's easy to paint Zynga as evil; they're a huge corporation, Nimblebit are a couple of brothers.

So, a developer who "borrowed" an idea from another Developer cries about someone "borrowing" their "borrowed" idea.

Wow.

@Bucketdeth: Someone is trying to hard. Corporation Inc and Tiny Towers, only seem to have the fact that they take place in a skyscraper in common. Making a blatant ripoff on the same platform is hardly the same.

@SpicyRichter said:

But they don't care about mega mall story?

While they share a similar setting they aren't cookie cutter identical like we're seeing here.

Now that is a well constructed burn that I can get behind.

And Nimblebit liked SimTower a whole lot, so what? Are we not permitted to lend inspiration from each other now? If a competitor can do what you do, and they do it better, market forces will assure that customers will move there. If their product is not as good, then they won't. In either case, either respond to the competition by improving your product, sue them, or shut up.

This is some passive-aggressive bullshit.

@Ydross said:

@thabigred: Explain to me how copy-pasting a game will lead to innovation?

And to everyone mentioning Sim Tower. Using ideas from a game is totally different from blatantly making the exact same game as someone else.

Saints Row. Imitation leads to innovation.

It is true that imitation can lower the return on all the effort made and can hurt profits lowering incentives for artists to innovate, but that's not going to be the case here or with Saints Row/GTA series. What this dynamic of imitation allows is for competitors to compete on things other than just price, and across the board what it does is forces companies to make their products more useful and in the case of games more fun for consumers. Because they have to deal with imitators it puts their feet to the coals so to speak. Now that Nimblebit knows they have to compete with Zynga in this space, if Tiny Tower ever gets a sequel they know it's going to have to be really good.

Rockstar could have come and said, we have a monopoly over this crime/open world games. That copyright would have had a cost associated with it, and it would had retracted from any future money they could spend on development. That outcome bar none would have been worse for consumers. Should Nimblebit get the Sim Tower clone on iOS market to itself because it got there first? Fuck no.

I promise you that Nimblebits opportunity cost has far and away payed for itself since their game has become a run away success, bitching about imitators coming into the market at this point is nothing other than rent seeking. Saying that you're entitled to all the money when both companies could be getting rich from this sort of game while consumers have more options is just stupid. And again, until you show me this is a worse outcome for consumers I fail to see where I should give a fuck. Nimblebits making money still, and from the sounds of it are selling more copies of the game due to free press. I don't need to feel sorry for them in the least.

But they don't care about mega mall story?

tiny tower devs should hire a 4th guy, just to get bubblegum graphics.

If this happened in any other medium, it would be considered copyright infringement rather than iterative evolution that constitutes fair use of the prior content. Further, if you share a song or a game with a friend, you're an evil "pirate" that is killing jobs and destroying the country and a borderline terrorist. When that douche bag Pincus at Zynga does it, he's a tech darling that is invited to White House dinners and is the talk of the town for being so innovative.

@Shuborno said:

I'm not sure why Zynga would have any defense here.

Zynga tried to buy Nimblebit. Nimblebit didn't go for it. Zynga just implemented Nimblebit's exact game themselves.

There's no iteration here. Just new art assets. It would be equivalent to someone pasting new models and textures on the same level/weapon/enemy design of a shooter. That's barely a mod, let alone a new product.

I don't think NimbleBit needs to worry though because it looks like Zynga's game has a terrible art style and NimbleBit's game is quirky and charming and is featured on the App Store by Apple.

Can we make the judgement that new art assets aren't innovative or iterative?

I played Crush the Castle years ago, both for free online in its Flash iteration and later for a dollar on my iPod Touch. It was a pretty fun game, and I really liked the medieval-tapestry art style.

A little over a year later, everyone's talking about Angry Birds. Rovio can't rake in the riches fast enough. To me, it's just a cartoony clone of Crush the Castle (which, for all I know, is probably a clone of some older stick figure flash game from the early aughts). To everyone else, it's a revelation. Everyone is playing it. Everyone is referencing in it. No one is talking about Crush the Castle.

Why? Probably because of the new art assets. More people like sling-shotting birds in to pigs than launching stones with a trebuche in to medieval kings.

Now, Zynga don't really qualify for this reprieve. They definitely aren't repackaging something with a niche appeal in a wrapper that will draw in the masses. I just thought I'd make the point that doing something as basic as reskinning an existing game can be just enough to launch it to widespread notoriety.

Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I don't know. I do have a hunch that more people are playing Angry Birds than Crush the Castle, though.

I would be a little more sympathetic if not for Tiny Tower stealing all my time. I really have to kick the habit of installing number management games.

This is pretty blatant, however clones are kinda how genres get started. Like how every shooter used to be a Doom clone, or how every open world sandbox was called a GTA clone.

Tiny Tower has nothing in common gameplay-wise with SimTower, other than the fact that both games contain towers.

@Krixok said:

@drowsap said:

@JerK said:

@DonutFever said:

@Bucketdeth said:

Teehee.

Haha... moral high ground lost.

Wow thats good to know I still hate Zygna but your point is also true

This.

I iterated by making it slightly darker than the original. I hope you guys all enjoy it and read my post and not the original!

That just kind of what Zynga does...

I don't know how much Zynga cares about the moral high ground here.

The funny thing is I bet the Zynga version will be way slower and more expensive but still make piles more money than Tiny Tower.

Tiny Tower is currently the only free-to-play game that I can play. Many of them start out promising but quickly slow to a crawl if you don't want to pay substantial amounts of money for their in game currency.

Anyone who compares it to Sim/Yoot Tower just outed themselves as not knowing anything about the game.

Despite that this whole argument is going to get stupid fast. A lot of games are very similar and it's fine but I think it is fair to point out and complain about an enormous developer who is getting very rich with wholesale duplicates of other peoples games. The huge success they had with Farmville is sad when you know it was a complete duplicate of Farm Town.

@BitterAlmond said:

This is why I've stayed clear of mobile gaming. That and the small screens and frustrating controls.

I'm playing Tiny Towers on my 40" tv :>

Ah, nice, passive aggression. Because we're so mature right?

If they think Zynga is plagiarizing them, they should file a lawsuit and be direct in drumming up attention.

This is getting pretty stupid.

@tourgen said:

@stinky said:

this is what makes video games good, people copying off each other.

copying, iterating and raising the bar.

sim tower was first as far as i can tell.

yes, in fact this is quite natural and good. This is how ideas naturally develop and mature, leading to even better ideas.

The evolution of video games. I'm sure that's the reason Zynga made this game.

Zynga is just so...easy to hate.

Even it seems like everyone is taking a swipe at them lately. Particularly enjoyed the "Zynga Abyss" article from Distance Quarterly posted in the Atlantic that was linked in Kotaku yesterday: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-zynga-abyss/251920/ (basically an article about the whole Skinner Box phenomenon).

@stinky said:

this is what makes video games good, people copying off each other.

copying, iterating and raising the bar.

sim tower was first as far as i can tell.

yes, in fact this is quite natural and good. This is how ideas naturally develop and mature, leading to even better ideas.

i just got into tiny tower, FUCKIng addictive.

At the end of the day people will play what they feel is the better of these two games. It seems to me that if NimbleBit has made a solid game then they shouldn't need to worry about some hot turd Zynga drops out of its smelly ass taking their customers away. The best way to secure their position is to make the better product.

But seriously, microtransactions can go eat a shit as far as i'm concerned. I waste alot of money on dumb shit but I gotta draw the line somewhere.

This is why I've stayed clear of mobile gaming. That and the small screens and frustrating controls.

@Damolition said:

@stinky said:

this is what makes video games good, people copying off each other.

copying, iterating and raising the bar.

sim tower was first as far as i can tell.

Well, they have 1/3 of that down to a science.

yeah, i've yet to see evidence of the other two.

Yeah, no, Sim Tower and Tiny Tower play very differently. Dream Heights is literally Tiny Tower with different graphics and sound. But hey, there's lots of scumbag developers on the smartphone app markets, this isn't a surprise at all.

@thabigred: Explain to me how copy-pasting a game will lead to innovation?

And to everyone mentioning Sim Tower. Using ideas from a game is totally different from blatantly making the exact same game as someone else.

@stinky said:

this is what makes video games good, people copying off each other.

copying, iterating and raising the bar.

sim tower was first as far as i can tell.

Well, they have 1/3 of that down to a science.

I sure do love seeing the same picture five times on the same page of the comment section.

One thing is clear, both Zynga and Nimblebit copied stuff from Limbo of the Lost. Scumbags!.

@drowsap said:

@JerK said:

@DonutFever said:

@Bucketdeth said:

Teehee.

Haha... moral high ground lost.

Wow thats good to know I still hate Zygna but your point is also true

This.

Well if this did anything for Tiny Tower is give them a shit ton of free marketing. I just downloaded the title myself just to see what its about.

@HotSauceMagik said:

SimTower?

Pot meets kettle.

Pot meet kettle. Kettle meet pot. Haha. I think SimTower is a dumb thing to mention in relation to Tiny Tower because it was so long ago, it was only vaguely inspired by it, and developed for a completely different platform.

I'm sure no one, including the developers, will claim Tiny Tower is a completely original work. However, anyone comparing Tiny Tower to SimTower or Corporation Inc in the same manner one would compare Tiny Tower to the Zynga game is completely doing it wrong. The Zynga game is basically a copy+paste of Tiny Tower, whereas the SimTower etc merely share elements.

Please don't derail the important issue here by mudding the waters with misinformation.