I was going to say, "Who cares?!?" as I don't care about games - I'm no longer at primary school!, but then what I *do* care about is the way Mrka is supposedly all about innovation, commerce, freedom, etc., but in reality is all about stifling innovation and competition. It's also all about fear (of litigation, lawsuits, poverty, people who are different in any way), and slavery to the almighty dollar. This lawsuit is yet another example of that, like the Aplle vs. Samsung lawsuit.

I'm not sure Zynga have actually ever had an original idea, but now they've ripped off someone who can actually fight back rather than small one and two man indie developers. It's pretty hard to win copyright claims for games though, you pretty much have to have copied code for them to get up.

Zynga has no original ideas and no customer service to speak of. About time these clowns get put in their place.

You can't copyright an idea, so EA is going after Zynga over similarities to artwork, rather than gameplay.

There are loads of implications in this case, but I do hope EA wins, as far as I know, Zynga has never made a game that wasn't a clone.

I had the same thought when i saw the ville. I actually think this is one scenario where ea and the sims has every right to sue. They are too similar to just be coincidence, and if it is coincidence it's negligence on zynga's part. They didn't do the appropriate research. @hipster-douchebag it's not just 5year olds that play games. Gaming is one of the biggest retail industries around. People make and loose huge amounts of money on it. It's all about the games these days!

I (rather embarrassingly) play a lot of these sorts of games, and while you expect some crossover the direct copying of game play ideas in this case made me raise an eyebrow. I wondered if there would be a law suit, and here it is!

I'm no EA lover, but I hope Zynga get whacked here.

I think it's more an issue over using similar ideas versus outright copying.

It's clear that alot of Games "share" the same ideas/play schemes but when there's outright copying (we are talking about screen for screen copying) like Zynga did with the sims and have done with other games (Tiny Tower) - then a line needs to be drawn.

The Funniest thing is that it's EA doing the fighting back. Who would've thought that?

That said, innovation is definitely not dead, developers have exhausted (i think) this current Gen of consoles and need a little bit more power. Nintendo is gathering pace with the WII U. PC just keeps on powering through.

And the PS Move & Kinect aren't a complete failure but need something big to push them along.

I'm only going to say one thing

WoW (& Clones) vs Guild Wars 2

Zynga steals games off everyone, most of their victims are simply too small to be able to afford the court battle that would ensue, EA can afford to sue them, and can ill-afford the cost of failing to sue them.

I don't like Znyga, I don't like Facebook games, and I don't like rip-offs, Zynga is guilty of it for more titles than I care to list, do some research, and you will find they are amassing a body count, and in this industry, you either absorb your competitors, or setup copyright/trademark/patent licenses between you and your opposition, to minimize the legal action (see intel and AMD for examples of this)

Hopefully, this will act as a deterrent to prevent more rip-off games showing up on Facebook, on iOS and on android, 'cause personally, for every minecraft that shows up, there's a thousand Mario clones, and I'd like to see that glut trimmed back a bit.