It seems there can’t be a single week without Zynga copying a popular Facebook game and releasing its own clone. Last week the makers of Tiny Tower accused Zynga of copying their game and releasing it as “Dream Heights”, and now developer Buffalo Studios points out to VentureBeat just how similar Zynga’s new bingo game is to Buffalo’s Bingo Blitz. They released an infographic showing the similarities, which you can see above.
By ruthlessly copying games and concepts, Zynga has become one of the most hated game developers over the past year. And rightfully so — the large company employs thousands of people and still manages to steal creative ideas from much smaller developers. Tiny Tower, for instance, only has 3 developers, while Zynga’s Dream Tower may have had hundreds working on the project.
Worse, Zynga has been very open about how they do business, with its CEO reportedly telling employees, “I don’t want fucking innovation. You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers”.
If you’re a Facebook user (and judging by the amount of active users, changes you are) you’ve probably heard of one of Zynga’s games. If it’s not FarmVille it’s CityVille and if it’s not CityVille it’s Mafia Wars. Furthermore, if you’ve got friends who are addicted to the games you’ll probably know how annoying recieving 10,000 invites to be their neighbor or join their mob is.
Luckily, if you were worried about this annoyance coming to Xbox Live, you no longer have to worry. Zynga’s own Brian Reynolds came forth to speak of the matter saying the the Xbox Live is just too small of a demographic for them to invest their time in. Below is a quote he recently game to Industry Gamers regarding the matter:
“[Xbox Live's] too small a demographic. Think about, of my friends, how many of them own an Xbox 360? Well, I’m a game developer and I even come from a triple-A space so we might even be in the double digits… Twenty or maybe even thirty percent of my friends might have an Xbox 360, but effectively 100% of them have Facebook and effectively 100% of them have a mobile phone. Of them, probably 90% have a smartphone.”
Don’t worry Zynga, we understand.
Social game behemoth Zynga apparently wants to block every game on Facebook that contains the word “ville” in it, and they’ve sent a cease and desist letter to Blingville LLC, makers of the Blingville Facebook game.
Blingville has responded by sending a letter to the court, seeking a declaration Blingville doesn’t infringe on Zynga’s trademarks. Zynga has, apparently, trademarked “ville” in use for any social game.
Video game legend John Romero, the man who created Doom, has joined social game dev LOLapps as a consultant. LOLapps have made lots of games that you see on Facebook and other social networks, including Quiz Creator and Critter Island. Romero will join a team at the developer and will work on a new game, hopefully something more serious (perhaps a shooter?) than LOL’s other games.
According to SlyVisions, Google has secretly invested $100 million into social game company Zynga. Zynga are the makers of the popular FarmVille and MafiaWars, among other Facebook games. Zynga has been valued at almost $4 billion, making it the most valued independent game company in the world.
Facebook is everywhere these days, and now it’ll be in StarCraft 2 as well. Blizzard has announced that they’ll be adding Facebook features to the game, with the ability to add your Facebook friends to your Battle.net account. Blizzard plans to expand on the Facebook features in the future for Battle.net.
Most of the games on Facebook — no, all of the games on Facebook — are a far cry from what we’re usually used to, and they’re only the most basic point and click adventures, with some social networking added to it. However, that will soon change, as the first FPS has been announced for Facebook. Called Brave Arms, it’s a full 3D shooter, with cartoonish looks like Team Fortress 2. The game will be released next month.
The most popular game on Facebook is currently FarmVille. Haven’t played it? It’s a Harvest Moon type game that has you managing a virtual farm. Not very enticing? Not for me either. However, the same could not be said for 3G Studio’s recently announced Brave Arms.
Brave Arms is what 3G Studios is calling a “social shooter” and also what seems to be the first full fledged FPS written for use on Facebook. There isn’t much more information about the game but there is a Facebook page up, here, where you can sign up for the beta.
I can see Brave Arms being a huge hit. Why hasn’t someone already done this?
Microsoft has announced that over 2 million users have used the new Facebook feature on Xbox Live and logged in on the popular social network. Microsoft also revealed that over half a million Last.fm accounts were created as well, while it didn’t provide numbers for Twitter usage.
The new features will also be available to Silver Members in free weekends, where they’ll be able to try out Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm.
Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm were announced to be coming to the Xbox 360 some time ago and yet the features have yet to go live. Today, it was made known that that both features will officially go live on November 17th.
News come to us from the UK Xbox website that clearly states “Service launches 17th November 2009″. So, for you Twitter addicts out here, you now have another option to update the world on your every move.
via joystiq
