Zynga-Innovation is Bad

[Stark of Winterfell]

http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/

The gist of the article is that Zynga has achieved meteoric wealth and success through a strategy of deliberately not innovating, and simply copying and overwhelming smaller competitors. What do you all think of this?

[Enemy of the State]

So what? They were able to make a better product than their competitors. The people playing those games are satisfied.

[Problem Sleuth]

They aren't 'better products' though. They're the exact same games, with extremely minor interface changes at best.

[Enemy of the State]

They aren't 'better products' though. They're the exact same games, with extremely minor interface changes at best.

They have a better business plan and have managed to bring these games to a larger amount of people. I think these games are atrocious, but for some reason millions of people enjoy playing them. Those smaller competitors didn't manage, too bad.

[Stark of Winterfell]

They legally licensed one game that became a hit. Good for them. The problem is that now they just use the fact that they are an established and larger company to drive competitors out of business. They're just using their wealth to get better exposure for their copies of others' games. How is this healthy for the market? Is theft good for the free market? (They've all but admitted to stealing concepts by settling in at least one lawsuit, they just have so much money that they can afford to pay the fine for stealing)

The smaller competitors didn't manage because they just went straight for inventing something new. I thought innovation was the pride of the free market?

[Enemy of the State]

There is no intellectual "property" in a truly free market. That they have any copyright themselves is the only crime here.

I thought innovation was the pride of the free market?

It is satisfying people's desires. Innovation simply leads to this.

[Salem1]

They legally licensed one game that became a hit. Good for them. The problem is that now they just use the fact that they are an established and larger company to drive competitors out of business. They're just using their wealth to get better exposure for their copies of others' games. How is this healthy for the market? Is theft good for the free market? (They've all but admitted to stealing concepts by settling in at least one lawsuit, they just have so much money that they can afford to pay the fine for stealing)

The smaller competitors didn't manage because they just went straight for inventing something new. I thought innovation was the pride of the free market?

A free market has too many positive associations to it these days. It means many things and amongst those things is ''dog eat dog'' taken to policy level, because the market is completely free. A classroom equivalent would roughly be making it free to copy the answers of other students because of ''free studying''. Then the free market does of course have its positive parts. Me, I think liberalism can only healthily be taken so far because you cannot trust people to act honestly when they have such freedom. It's the same thing as with communism, ignoring how people work for a system which would be very good had humans been programmable robots but we aren't.