Zynga has gotten a lot of flack of late for copying Tiny Tower with Dream Heights and Bingo Blitz with Zynga Bingo. The social developer gave a very nuanced response to the complaints, talking about how they are evolutions of what has come before, something that doesn’t sit well with Tiny Tower developer NimbleBit.
“It is a smart idea for Mark Pincus and Zynga to try and lump all games with the name Tower together as an actual genre whose games borrow from each other,” said NimbleBit’s Ian Marsh. “Unfortunately sharing a name or setting does not a genre make. The games Pincus mentions couldn’t be more different. Sim Tower is a true ‘sim’ with macroscopic management and fine tuning of a buildings facilities. Tower Bloxx is a timing based high score game.”
“If you take a quick look before ‘pulling the lens back’ as Pincus suggests, you’ll find an innumerable number of details in the game that were painstakingly crafted to be identical to Tiny Tower,” noted Marsh. “These are core gameplay mechanics and rules, not similar settings or themes that games in the same genre might share.”
“Why are there five different business types like Tiny Tower? Why do five people fit in an apartment instead of four or six? Why are there VIP elevator riders that perform the same functions as Tiny Tower? Why do businesses employ exactly three workers and produce exactly three products that are stocked in exactly the same way as Tiny Tower?” he added. “Even the tutorials at the beginning of the game follow the exact same steps.”
“All of these things are poorly hidden underneath an uninspired veneer which has become Zynga’s trademark,” concluded Marsh.
Source: toucharcade.com
