Former Employees of Zynga Reveal Company's Shady Idealogy

killiana: your comments are spot on and I agree 100%.

At least they are explicit. That's actually more honest than 90% of their competitors.

Oh give me a frakking break, this is not news. What corporation do you know that does not look at what their competitors are doing and copy the things that work well? It's called surviving in a competitive, capitalistic environment. And here I am thinking I was going to read about something really underhanded like corporate espionage or sabotage or something. Move is a blatant rip off of the Wiimote--so why don't you write the same article about Sony? Sony created the first personal stereo player, the Walkman and everyone copied it. It has now evolved into the mp3 player, and every tech company has one. The first smartphone was designed by IBM and since then, RIM, Apple and everyone else has smart phones. How many Tetris clones have you seen out there?

@ChichiriMuyo The issue here is not Gunpei Yokoi. Zynga has taken a look from real-life at what works and what does not. As for innovation, you are right. In any company, there is a place where the buck stops hence the ultimate decision on whether something flies or is permanently grounded. Your coder is not the one leading the project, in meetings he can let his ideas be known. Whether or not his idea is lauded as a good one that will increase the bottom line will be decided. What I was speaking to is those of my generation (Gen Y) who come to a job with a sense of entitlement that all their ideas will be lauded as unique diamonds in the rough, but when they face criticism, they leave and throw a hissy fit such as "Zynga doesn't like creativity?!" So who am I to trust? The disgruntled ex-employee speaking from emotion or the company head who in meetings with project leaders discussed the costs and benefits of the ex-employee's idea? I trust the latter because it is a much more rational, level headed process. Emotion makes people exaggerate and twist the stories, which I find as completely unbelievable and rooted in an inadequacy of self worth stemming possibly from unreal expectations and narcissism.

Sounds just like Sony, but honestly almost all publishers/developers are known for stealing other companies idea's. The only company I know who doesn't is Nintendo.

And I thought copying is just a common practice in the industry of gaming?

They sound just about like any other developer to me....

@halil23 so your saying sony never copied anything? hhmm guess what the ps one was? how did they get a joystick added to their controller before MS did? when is the "move" coming out? hhmmm yeah sony doesnt copy do they?

@Killiana1a Almost no other company in the world thinks that way, and I'm not just talking gaming. When someone is your employee, their on-the-job innovations become your property. Take the case of Gunpei Yokoi, who started at Nintendo as a janitor. When Sakaguchi saw him playing around with a mechanical extending arm he immeadiately put Yokoi to work on toys and marketed that device. Yokoi went on to make Nintendo millions (perhaps billions). Even if the worker leaves, like Yokoi did, you've already gotten the thing that was truly valuable - their creativity. Just stifling their creativity isn't going to stop them from moving to another company, and in fact it will encourage them to. Do you really think people want to waste their good ideas on a company they don't want to work for? Seriously, you're the fool that needs to be checked. Companies love it when low-paid workers produce multi-million dollar ideas, except Zynga.

Unless you own the gaming company, your job in gaming is not to express your creativity to your fullest satisfaction. Rather, the question comes down to why risk millions of the company's income to placate some attention-seeking, narcissist who will use their "creative" game to get their next gig in 2 years, when there are profit gaining formulas right in front of us everyday? In simpler terms, why should we go ahead with your creative ideas if you will not be around for more than 2 years and even less if we give you the green light? Some fools need to be checked. You want to be creative? Do it on your own dime on your own time; not on the owner's dime and time.

No biggie everyone does this.

wow gamers hopping on a negative bandwagon? tell me something new. Zynga just does what companies like MS did with XBox and Live. I don't recall any kind of consistent negative evilness coming out from gamers about Live. Considering it's a ripoff of PC communities that were out years before. This is a selective cherry picking. Zynga makes a lot of cash for a game that most elite gamers hate. They hate the concept that such a simple game that isn't about murder, killing, explosions is making more money than the current model. Zynga has a smart business model. They are stable and not reliant on burst gaming and publishers. Yeah Zynga copies. But I get most of the favorite games out their copy ideas. Theres nothing more shady about Zynga than MS, EA, Ubisoft, Activion, Midway, Take Two, Namco-Bandai, Capcom.....

I guess M$ inspiration of "monopoly of theft" will never die eh?! @ prime, let me be your teacher, get that Sony off your post if you want to talk facts!

Crappy game company has crappy development process. My God, its a scoop.

Look at how they work, and you see this is valid. they look at what is out there and tweak to bring in money.

don't forget that they started rigging things so that you can't complete them without giving them real money

Zynga is a shameless thief of ideas? How is this different than almost every other game publisher?

This SF Weekly is great. It's a free magazine all over the city, and the cover says FARMVILLAINS in huge letters, and it attacks everybody. It even discusses how the whole industry works just like this, and even brings up EA buying PlayFish to make the same copycat games, but they change the names more, into "Country Story" and "Gangster City."

I believe they gave them $100m in funding, if I recall correctly.

Didn't Google buy a big portion of this company?

Sounds like Microsoft and Sony!

just looking and you can instantly realize that its just a copy, but that coulda been just nature of design, now we know its just a blatant ripoff.

While it's always something to suspect, it's still interesting to hear these reports from people who would actually know something about it.

Zynga focuses on profit and baltantly steals ideas, concepts, and gameplay from other developers? I thought that was pretty obvious.