Zynga is taking flak for a pair of its newest games: Dream Heights and Zynga Bingo, with the developers of existing games Tiny Tower and Bingo Blitz respectively suggesting that Zynga has been too heavily inspired by their titles.
Now CEO Mark Pincus has come out swinging against the copycat claims, telling VentureBeat that the company is no plagiarist.
“We think there is a massive body of work in the video game industry that is going to be reimagined for decades to come in a way that is free, accessible and social,” he tells VentureBeat. “That’s what we’re doing. I don’t think anyone should be surprised when they see us come out with games that they’ve seen before, a decade or more ago. I don’t think there are a lot of totally new games that are invented. We always try.”
Pincus also points out that some of the moneymaking mechanics pioneered by Zynga have found widespread adoption within the social games industry, and points to Bingo Blitz’s similarity to a previous Zynga game, Poker Blitz.
“I think people in the industry are defining innovation different from the way we are,” says Pincus. “When you define innovation, you have to define what problem are you innovating against. The problem we are innovating against is how do we get a billion people to play together.”
Meanwhile, Zynga is engaged in a war of words with Tiny Tower NimbleBit, after Pincus said “You should be careful not to throw stones when you live in glass towers. When you pull the lens back, you saw that their tower game looked similar to five other tower games going all the way back to SimTower in the early 1990s.”
NimbleBit’s Ian Marsh has already responded: “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. Unfortunately sharing a name or setting does not a genre make. The games Pincus mentions couldn’t be more different.”
