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Kixeye's Harbin: Why would we want to steal Zynga's secrets?
Kixeye's Harbin: Why would we want to steal Zynga's secrets?
 

October 17, 2012   |   By Mike Rose

Comments 7 comments

More: Social/Online, Smartphone/Tablet, Business/Marketing





"Why on earth would we want to emulate a business that has seen a 75 percent decline in share price since their debut?"
- Kixeye chief executive Will Harbin lays into Zynga, after Zynga won a restraining order against his colleague Alan Patmore.

Zynga sued Patmore earlier this month over alleged theft of trade secrets, and this week Patmore was told to return all Zynga data to the company, and give Zynga access to his personal files.

Harbin isn't at all happy about it either, and has some strong words for Zynga.

"Given their financial situation it all feels pretty desperate," he said. "Our games have little in common with the ones that Zynga is known for. We make synchronous, combat strategy games. They make asynchronous cow clicking games."

He added, "According to their S1, their games average $.06 ARPDAU. Our games generate up to 20x that. You do the math."
 
 
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Comments

David Amador
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Well said sir

Alan Rimkeit
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His opinion still not change the fact that Alan Patmore may have stolen trade secrets or private company documents from Zynga when he left. If they prove this so then Zynga has a case, period. I dislike Zynga as much as the next person but IP or information theft is a serious issue and should not be made light of in any context ever.

Michael Ball
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Considering how many of their games are essentially carbon copies of already-existing titles except in the actual code, I don't see what trade secrets Zynga would have worth stealing.

Toby Grierson
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They have a technology that lets you create game design documents by tapping the print screen key then pasting into MSPaint.

Lee Montgomery
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"You do the math."

Comparing your maximum performer to someone else's portfolio average isn't math; it's disingenuous.

Mikhail Mukin
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Well... most people I know take something they worked on with them... It is probably not legal, but for me the question is how you gonna use it. If this is just to look something up later, to educate yourself, to maybe remember how you did something etc - I'm fine with it. But if this is to "re-use" significant portions of code/art or even present (slightly modified) ideas of yet unreleased games as your own or hurt your previous employer in some way - this is not cool.

So while this guy is probably guilty (by the letter of law)... I wonder what prompted this...

hehe - and why copy to dropbox? Copy to your USB drive, it is less traceable...

Alan Rimkeit
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760 documents? I can understand a few. But 760? That is a lot to keep for any portfolio be it for a programmer or an artist.


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