据美国在线旗下的games网站消息，社交游戏开发商Zynga前员工日前透露，公司CEO马克·平卡斯(Mark Pincus)宁愿抄袭竞争对手的设计，也不愿自主创新。

这名前员工回忆说，平卡斯曾经说过：“我不喜欢创新。你们并不比竞争对手聪明，只要抄袭他们的设计就可以了。”

zynga

该前员工还讽刺Zynga商业模式，称：“剽窃他人的游戏，然后投入数百万美元发展这款游戏。”

Zynga的另一位合同员工称，Zynga曾交给他一项任务，主要是关于模仿竞争对手的游戏。当时，Zynga明确要求：“抄袭那款游戏。”

当这名合同员工提出，这样做可能会遭到游戏设计者的起诉时，Zynga给出的答复是：“没关系，如果遭到起诉，我们来解决。”

据悉，在Zynga开发的游戏中，《黑帮战争》模仿自Psycho Monkey开发的《MOB WARS》，《Farmville》模仿自Slashkey开发的《Farm Town》，《FISHVILLE》模仿自TallTree Games开发的《FISH WORLD》，《咖啡世界》模仿自Playfish开发的《RESTAURANT CITY》，《PETVILLE》模仿自Playfish开发的《PET SOCIETY》。

FarmVille creator Zynga is the most popular Facebook game publisher — that’s no debating that. Out of the top 10 most popular games on Facebook, Zynga created seven of them: FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille, Cafe World, Treasure Isle and PetVille. And while these games are beloved by many, the company behind the game hasn’t always garnered a ‘friendly’ reputation with players or the games industry as a whole.

In a new tell-all article, ‘FarmVillians’ in San Francisco’s SF Weekly, former Zynga employees dish about what they witnessed behind the scenes, which gives credence to the company’s less-than-savory reputation. Apparently, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus meant what he said in his now-famous quote, admitting that he “did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues,” and one of those things includes blatantly copying competitor’s games.

The SF Weekly article is long and certainly worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few of the more memorable quotes from Zynga’s exes:

“I don’t fucking want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”

One contractor says he was offered freelance work from Zynga, related to mimicking a competitor’s application, with explicit instructions: “Copy that game.”

“I was around meetings where things like that were being discussed, and the ramifications of things like that were being discussed – the fact that they’d probably be sued by the people who designed the game,” he says. “And the thought was, ‘Well, that’s fine, we’ll settle.’ Our case wasn’t really defensible.” Psycho Monkey’s suit was ultimately settled for an undisclosed amount.

The former senior employee who was present for Pincus’ “No innovation” diatribe described Zynga’s business model this way: “Steal somebody else’s game, throw millions of dollars at it, and then, if it doesn’t have it already, add virtual coins.”

To be fair, there are hundreds of successful corporations that were built on a concept that was an iteration of an existing idea. That’s what makes the business world go ’round. Facebook itself is an iteration of a dozen social networks before it — but Mark Zuckerberg’s version just happened to resonate with the general population more than, say, Orkut or Friendster did before it.

Some could argue that Zynga simply did the same, but Pincus and his company have also built up a sense of distrust over the past few years, something that needs to be changed if they want to give companies like Electronic Arts and Activision a run for their money, and more importantly, if they want to keep players from looking for new virtual fields to harvest.（source：games/sina）