Zynga has had to deal accusations of copying game elements by NimbleBit, makers of Tiny Tower. Now a user on Reddit claiming to be a former full-time engineer for Zynga has given the details about how far the social game company goes to copy competitors’ games.
“[The Tiny Tower and Dream Heights situation] is all standard operating procedure here. If you can’t buy ’em, clone ’em. Even the core technology for FarmVille (MyMiniLife), was bought,” wrote the user going by the handle Mercenary-Games. ”The only ‘homegrown’ codebases at Zynga is Mafia Wars 2 and maybe Poker, the rest of their tech was just bought from small studios. Look up Dextrose Engine. To me, that’s utterly creepy. They try to choke out the competition by gating all these engines and tech. Producers and Product Managers often scout the market. Whatever is trending hot, will get cloned, bought, or buried.”
He also noted that Zynga tracks high paying users (which are dubbed “Zynga Black”) and alters games so that users will spent more. “Internal metrics researchers often give studio wide talks on what trends are going on. They’ve basically tracked down very popular players and also players who’ve spent an excess of 10k into the game,” noted Mercenary-Games. “We often tweak our features to match and maximize for a particular gaming habit. We do this for massive populations of players. Players are not aware of this. To me, that’s a big brother like issue, someone is measuring and monitoring your behavior intimately, and you don’t know how that data is going to be used.”
Source: Reddit.com
