Zynga Shamelessly Rips Off 'Tiny Tower' With Canadian Release of 'Dream Heights'

No love for Zynga here; the bulk of my rent for the past reasonable stretch of time has been paid for by a Zynga competitor, and a lot of office time has been spent ripping on them for their various tactics. There are many things to hate Zynga for, especially if you've actually talked to people that work there (or that have jumped ship, or they've tried to recruit).

But I really don't buy the idea that gamblers are the target market. I know that demo very well, as my previous life was spent running numbers for an online gambling company (my experience with market analysis in that context got me most of my recent work), and I've always been a bit of a poker junkie myself. The Facebook crowd is far more casual, far more female, and far less into tangible, liquid rewards than the gambling crowd.

Mistaking the motivations of this crowd is a serious mistake, and if you are under the assumption that the Facebook gaming crowd is made up of Pokerstars castoffs, for the sake of your business I strongly encourage you to reevaluate the situation. While there may be surface similarities in the addictive natures of these games, the people that spend money on gambling are almost always looking for real life gains; this stands in strong opposition to the typical motivation of a Facebook gamer, who is in it for the fantasy alone.

I'm not saying that Facebook would not make a great market for real life gamblers, but at the moment, it's not feasible because they don't allow actual gambling. And the real gamblers know the difference - they won't even play on fake money poker sites, for the most part, even the ones that are quite badly addicted to poker. I seriously doubt that they're the same people that sink money into Facebook games to buy virtual goods that let them decorate their farms or give their avatars new haircuts...

I know it was just an example, but Tiny Tower is nothing like Sim Tower.

Sim Tower is an elevator/people flow simulation. It's also much more fun than Tiny Tower.

> You could argue Tiny Tower ripped off Sim Tower etc.

About the only thing Tiny Tower and SimTower have in common is the word "Tower".

Thanks for posting this - I was having enough nostalgia for Sim Tower that I started looking around for this Tiny Tower. Unfortunately there's almost no information from the developer other than the iTunes download page, so I put it off.

Now I can properly procrastinate by figuring out how on earth to run Sim Tower on a 3-month-old Mac. Thanks again!

Thanks for responding. I do realize that HN has a strong libertarian bent, still I assume that healthy debate is more important than ideology.

For the record: I am not advocating suffocation by regulation. I am asking where the line is drawn, and how people feel about the basic marriage between operant conditioning and micro transactions.

Responding to what you said about WoW and Farmville: I did specify that I am talking about the REWARD systems employed by the games. Having played both, I know the differences between them as games. (suffered as a Shaman from nearly version 1)

Both though do use basic operant conditioning techniques. In WoW you have your XP bar which gives you your fixed ratio reinforcement, and then drops which provide your variable ratio reinforcement. Then you have your various other schedules which come from leveling up professions, progression, achievements and so on.

Farmville has similar mechanisms - your constant crop growth and timings are your regular reinforcement and then you have random drops which provide your variable reinforcement.

There really isn't any other science behind these systems when it comes to how the reward mechanisms are designed.

The games themselves are very different. Skill/ingenuity does play a huge role in WoW (like the rogue who soloed patchwork), I am in no way comparing the skill requirements of the two games. Farmville can be played by a bot.