The Ville and The Sims Social similarities lead to EA suing Zynga for copyright infringement
The battle of browser-based social games commences
A legal battle between Electronics Arts and Zynga begins today, as the former sues the latter for copyright infringement due to similarities between The Sims Social and The Ville. The two social games, based around creating a realistic avatar, its home and its social network both clearly take influence from Maxis' Sims titles, but whether that's to the extent of copyright infringement is up to the courts. Fortunately for fans of these two games, they don't read gaming news anyway and can continue playing happily (/snark).
Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw issued the following statement to the press, in regards to its lawsuit:
"The legal reasons are solid. But for creative teams who feel that their hard work and imaginations have been ripped off, there's obviously an emotional element too. As outlined in our complaint, when The Ville was introduced in June 2012, the infringement of The Sims Social was unmistakable to those of us at Maxis as well as to players and the industry at large."
Interestingly enough, EA is trying to earn some positive karma out of the entire situation as well. Zynga, well, has been rumored to have danced around copyright infringement in the past with multiple games. EA is more than comfortable pointing this out, and even goes so far as to declare themselves champions of smaller developers:
"This is a case of principle. Maxis isn't the first studio to claim that Zynga copied its creative product. But we are the studio that has the financial and corporate resources to stand up and do something about it. Infringing a developer's copyright is not an acceptable practice in game development. By calling Zynga out on this illegal practice, we hope to have a secondary effect of protecting the rights of other creative studios who don't have the resources to protect themselves."
Zynga has since replied to the cause, stating, "It's unfortunate that EA thought that this was an appropriate response to our game, and clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic copyright principles." Zynga has run into some troublesome waters in past weeks, and a lawsuit from the likes of EA is only going to make matters worse.
Check out EA's full complaint here.
Section: PC Games
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I'm sure we all remember this http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/dear-zynga.jpeg
its sad. its pathetic. its childish. none of these developers have my respect, nor do they deserve the respect of others.
It's not so simple as to go "looks like ours, lets sue em" apparently Zynga made the copy paste situation of social gaming go to entirely new levels. Document covers most of that.
In the social media realm and especially overseas in Korean / Japan and China you see this a lot more often between new developers and basically no one has the money to fight it in court and sustain their business. For EA they have money and time and a strong case on their hands as well.
Like I said before, it goes deeper than cheap aesthetics otherwise they wouldn't bother waging the case.
Stealing someone else's work is a very serious crime. What Vegita said covers it pretty well, and if he hadn't posted, I wouldn't have even been aware of the deeper and obvious elements stolen.
Reading the complaint now though, EA is just metaphorically curbstomping Zynga with all this evidence.
Additionally, what Vegita or the article didn't cover but is probably a major example of Zynga in all of this, is that Zynga actually hired three key EA employees relating to the game.
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