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

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

#61

Post by ry0ohki »

adgar wrote: post #47
Splines wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!

That's why I was really disappointed in Tiny Tower, really was hoping it was a new implementation of Sim Tower instead of a Farmville set in skyscrapers.

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

#62

Post by hythloday »

intended wrote: post #35
Uchikoma wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to some, Zygna is not targeting casual gamers but casual gamblers (same motivations, same demographic) There was a discussion about that on HN some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3453040

I think they are. WoW, Farmville, all use a skinnerian model - different reward types on variable, regular and random schedules designed to make sure that you get that next dopamine buzz just right in time. leastI don't doubt that some of these games need someone to take a look into them. Likely we need legislation such as that which covers the gambling industry or rules such as those that cover the slot machine indu…

This seems like an impossible thing to regulate. What public good are you aiming to maximize? What has the market proven that it can't do without intervention? How will you determine which market behaviours are the "bad" ones?

In the case of gambling, I think the only protection the public needs is education ("the house always wins")--in the UK, at least, gambling regulation is usually in place to isolate gambling from other criminal activities e.g. money laundering, and to make sure the house isn't cheating, i.e. that it's a game of chance. Neither of those rationales seem to be necessary for skinner-box-like-games.

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

#63

Post by tatsuke95 »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #37
wdewind wrote: post #3

Honestly, this isn't really even that bad. There are a ton of games ripped off of Zynga that are MUCH closer to the Zynga assets. You could argue Tiny Tower ripped off Sim Tower etc. The whole thing is stupid. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, even other giants.

Maybe it is "wrong," maybe it isn't. But it still goes to prove that Zynga is still the shit-eating company we have always known it to be (no disrespect to most of the employees, who probably want to make fun, original games against the will of their superiors). Zynga has boatloads of cash, and yet it can't afford to innovate just a little bit? Pathetic.

>no disrespect to most of the employees, who probably want to make fun, original games against the will of their superiors

Then they should get out there and make original games. They're as much to blame as anyone. Sarah Lacy's article yesterday mentioned Zynga as one of the sexy places to work in SV. People want to work there, despite the shady practices.

We have this tendency to act like the little guy has no blame in things like this, whether it's war or the financial crisis or making bad social games. Like there's some line drawn between evil corporate and good little employees. Guess what? If the developers aren't going there and punching the clock every day, these games aren't getting made.

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

#66

Post by avolcano »

binarycrusader wrote: post #34

And tiny tower is arguably just a tweaked version of sim tower. Whoopie doo. But seriously, the whole time I played tiny tower, all I could think about was where was the rage over copying yoot saito?

Sim Tower is basically an elevator management simulator with some very basic tower management that's similar to something like Sim City. Tiny Tower is a very simple game about building floors putting people in the right floors. There's no comparison beyond the fact that they both take place in towers.

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

#67

Post by rfvtgb »

marknutter wrote: post #25

replace Zynga with Epic and Tiny Tower and Dream Heights with Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. Video game companies copy each other. It's up to the consumer to decide which version is worth their money. I for one welcome some competition to Tiny Tower, especially after the game was ruined for me when I found out that setting the iPhone clock ahead allowed you to cheat the game..

>replace Zynga with Epic and Tiny Tower and Dream Heights with Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament.

Bad example. UT and Q3A were released withing 10 days of each other. The development time for an FPS such as Q3 doesn't leave much time for it to copy UT. On the other hand, Tiny Tower has been around for about half a year, plenty of time for Zynga to imitate as it pleases.

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

#68

Post by smackfu »

jason_slack wrote: post #16

I can see NimbleBits being miffed a bit, but they have not released an update in a very long time. I tweeted @eeen and he said there is no update anytime soon. My wife cannot play Tiny Tower anymore, she has every floor possible (153), 12 vacant floors (waiting for more floor types to build), 30 million coins and 250 bux. Is this what an "iPhone Game Of The Year" acts like? It seems to me that Tiny Tower was a great…

Well, the other half of having 3 employees is that you move on to the next game, and the old one is left as-is.

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

#69

Post by smackfu »

kevinh wrote: post #22

I find it truly bizarre just how many employees Zynga has, considering the number of products they produce. Mobile development has shown us time and time again that a game like Farmville can be easily made with 5 employees. There must be a gigantic bureaucratic they have to fight in order to get anything done with that gigantic mass of employees.

Focusing on number of employees is pretty pointless, since outsourcing randomly makes departments internal or external. Zynga has an accounting department and HR and janitors and receptionists, which 3-person companies just do not have. Heck, the guys who make Tiny Tower don't even have someone to do music since they licensed it.

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

#70

Post by Uchikoma »

bermanoid wrote: post #41
Uchikoma wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to some, Zygna is not targeting casual gamers but casual gamblers (same motivations, same demographic) There was a discussion about that on HN some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3453040

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 t…

Poker is - in that sense - not gambling. The comparison as far as I understand it is between social games and slot machine. The link says that the democraphic is primarily female, so "The Facebook crowd is far more casual, far more female, and far less into tangible, liquid rewards than the gambling crowd." would fit. Slot machine users are also not into liquid rewards but are addicted for the entertainment.
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