Evil Farmers

A recent post about Zynga, the creators of oh-so-famoose FarmVille on Facebook, on SFWeekly has spreaded almost everywhere on the net. The original post can be found here.

Just to requote Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: "I don't fucking want innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

I always didn't like Zynga for creating FarmVille, a game that really abuses social engineering (I think that's what it's called) to get people to play it but what we are seeing here could potentially destroy the game industry. If you thought Microsoft or McDonald is evil and somehow bent on WORLD DOMINATION, you obviously haven't seen what they could've done to make it worse, which is what Zynga is doing.

BLATANTLY copying games and using their influence to overshadow the originals and claim theirs is the one? That's very evil in so many damn ways. It's the total opposite of what Microsoft is doing which is giving newer developers a chance to stand beside them. Zynga just takes your game, copy it, and says that it's theirs.

I heard a lot of game developers, both indie and mainstream alike (espacially indie, cus...well...it's indie people) have voiced their dissent over Zynga's methods. It's less obvious here and SG because we are still growing, almost everyone is still running around going 'let's make cool innovative games in the future!'.

I think we should be aware that the games industry is still an industry; a market. And with us being only human, there are bound be encounter evil people like these.