I last week wrote about Atari and Zynga showcasing imbalance in the iOS games industry. The main thrust of the argument was that in cases of a developer being inspired by an existing product, they were leaving themselves open to attack if small, but would be unaffected by the opposition (bar, possibly, some negative PR) if big. The two examples were:

  • Atari forcing Vector Tanks games off of the App Store, due to the indie games borrowing fairly heavily from Atari’s Battlezone.
  • Zynga’s Dream Heights looking perilously close to indie dev NimbleBit’s Tiny Towers.

GamesBeat now has a response from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus about the second of those spats:

We think there is a massive body of work in the video game industry that is going to be reimagined for decades to come in a way that is free, accessible and social. That’s what we’re doing. I don’t think anyone should be surprised when they see us come out with games that they’ve seen before, a decade or more ago. I don’t think there are a lot of totally new games that are invented. We always try. But to us, they are like the crew mechanic in our games. They give you a new way to interact with your friends.

To be fair to Pincus, I don’t have a problem with this argument. Even many of the games you think were amazingly original when they appeared at the dawn of the industry were effectively clones, or at least based heavily on existing games. Defender? Space Invaders, flipped on its side, with scrolling and a dash of Asteroids—and that’s a compressed version of the description I got directly from the game’s creator during a phone interview for Retro Gamer, not my own take on things.

However, what Pincus doesn’t address (and nor would I expect him to) is that this approach is only fine today if you are a company like Zynga, backed by an army of lawyers and a pile of cash. He’s essentially using the same excuse as the Vector Tanks devs—that it’s fine to take an existing gaming idea and put your own spin on it to add further value. But it isn’t nearly a level playing field, and indies are the ones hit by the fallout, whether they’re the ones providing inspiration (and cannot afford to battle huge companies inspired by their games) or drawing from existing gaming properties (and cannot afford to defend when a large company has their game removed from sale).

Hat-tip: The Appside.

Further reading: NimbleBit responds on TouchArcade regarding just how close Tiny Towers and Dream Heights are—clearly in the same ballpark as Battlezone and the original Vector Tanks.