Social games king Zynga has been accused of not-so-subetly borrowing from other games in the past, but no developer made its argument as succinctly as Tiny Tower developers NimbleBit has.
Nimblebit has passed around an image comparing Tiny Tower and an upcoming iPhone game from Zynga called Dream Heights, alleging that NimbleBit “wanted to thank all you guys [Zynga] for being such big fans of our iPhone game of the year, Tiny Tower!”
Apple named Tiny Tower as its iPhone game of the year in December.
The image from NimbleBit has a humorous tone, but the three-man company isn’t shying away from accusing Zynga of taking a little more than its fair share of inspiration from Tiny Tower.
I’ve contacted NimbleBit and Zynga, but have yet to hear back from either company.
The move from Nimblebit has come under some scrutiny for Tiny Tower’s own inspiration from Sim Tower, which was released by Maxis back in 1994. Sim Tower has since been ported to iOS, as well, but under the name Yoot Tower, playing on the name of the game’s creator, Yoot Saito.
In an interesting twist, NimbleBit designer Ian Marsh pointed out that Zynga once tried to acquire NimbleBit.
Cloning and iteration is common problem in mobile and social games. Super Crate Box creator Vlambeer famously raised a stink over its Radical Fishing being cloned, and will be exploring the issue at the Game Developers Conference with a panel called “Clones: Advancing the Discussion.”
Zynga makes it hard to not hate them.
Wasn't there some former Zynga employees that said that they were pretty much told to look at other games that they could make cheap rip-offs of, some time ago?
And... This seems like it might be another one.
I saw this yesterday. SO funny. Really sucks that devs are copying each other so hard. Stupid Zynga.
You know, I WANT to like Zynga most of the time. But damn do they make it hard.
SimTower?
Pot meets kettle.
It's pretty disgusting how frequently this seems to happen, although most people are quick to excuse it because it's usually Gameloft aping games that aren't on mobile devices (which arbitrarily makes it okay).
When the best you can get out of a PR-obsessed behemoth like Capcom is a half-assed apology, what hope is there for any contrition from Zynga?
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.
Zynga makes this real bad and obvious. When Tiny Wings never came to Android, I wasn't bothered by Dragon, Fly! because it was the same game, but it was free. Now there is an ad-free paid version of it and I think it is really crazy that people can get away with things like this in the mobile market.
Tiny Tower is awesome though, and it looks better than Zynga's dumb game.
And Tiny Tower is a lot like Sim Tower.
I was a big fan of SimTower and was initially dismissive of Tiny Tower because it looked like a rip off but upon playing I saw that while there was certainly inspiration from Sim Tower, Tiny Tower is a much different game. Zynga's game on the other hand, is shameless.
Didn't capcom rip off a bunch of games when they started their mobile group?
This is just straight the hell up plagiarism.
I'm going to tweet Zynga about this. Will post their reply if it comes.
Seriously, spent a good few seconds trying to figure out what was wrong with this Alex article. Not so disappointed anymore :)
It's worth noting Zynga originally tried to buy Nimblebit before all this.
@Excast said:
QFT.
Iteration, copying, and using ideas from other games are one thing and are defensible, if not a good thing. This is outright thievery. It's a palette swap of the game. This isn't just taking ideas or inspiration, it's entirely recreating the game in a non-copyright infringing way.
I don't know how anyone could be defending this as normal industry practice. There's a line and it's obviously crossed here.