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Comment by ignifero | Hacker News Reader

The thing with Zynga, is they have zero innovation and zero IP capital. You might as well invest in a chinese ripoff and it would be the same. Sure they make tons of profits but they will never earn my respect. They stole everyone else's ideas, continuously spammed and manipulated their users, and did every horrible trick in the book. That's not hacker attitude; that's borderline criminal. To illustrate, here is a post in facebook's forum from Pincus himself, trying to make excuses for gambling ads they'd been running on games: http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=12983...

I would buy. I would sell before the end of the day though.

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I'm not saying that they're a paragon of virtue or anything, but if you don't have respect for Zynga's abilities then you're missing some really valuable insights. Sure, they "ripped off" the idea for almost every game they've ever made, but as many commenters here love to point out, it's not just the idea that matters, but the execution (setting aside for now the point that everyone steals ideas - remember when those jerks at Google "ripped off" the idea of a search engine?).

Zynga didn't just make another farm game, they used their familiarity with FB's viral channels to make it the biggest silly little farm game on the platform. Then they turned around and used that audience as a springboard for a number of other games that, while derivative, were simply the strongest distillations of their respective types.

I get it, everyone loves to hate Zynga, but the fact is that they are really good at what they do, and lots of people out there enjoy their games.

As an indie fb game developer, i 've been following zynga over the years. Their spam tactics were the reason that facebook started changing their platform policies every month. Zynga took advantage of the fact that facebook at the time was not enforcing its app policies (remember forced invites?) so they maxed out their reach by using shady tricks and consistently breaking or bending the ToS. I remember me and other devs complaining to facebook for months and nothing was ever done. When facebook started limiting viral channels, zynga was already too big to be touched.

In the process, they destroyed many indie developers and the fear of being wiped by zynga is still everpresent. Personally, i find it hard to love anything about them, even after years. I 'm not jealous of them or their profits, but i find it hard to wish them "good luck". Maybe if they had started their own social gaming network i'd give them some credit. Zynga is still a parasite on facebook.

Here is a relevant answer from a former facebook engineer: http://www.quora.com/Will-Zynga-leave-Facebook

Here's them posting fake reviews of their games: http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=41577

I 'm not jealous of them or their profits

Y'know, I think it's perfectly legitimate to be jealous of their profits.

IMHO, Zynga's moto should be "There's a lot of money in stupid".

The thing with Zynga, is they have zero innovation

From a technical perspective, that's true. The innovation is the application of psychology to extract money from their customers via software Skinner boxes. Arguably evil, definitely profitable.

But still hardly innovative behaviorism

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