There was a lecture held by Joe Hayashi of Palm on competition that boiled down something like "To become nr 1, do whatever it takes. To stay nr 1, copy nr 2".
If you look at today's leading companies in pretty much any field you will see this pattern emerge to some extent. Well, apart from Apple who don't do ANY market research whatsoever.

it is true for most industries, I do feel like nintendo managed to go against the grain with that statement in the game industry with the wii. I mean it's two rival competitors came out with technological power houses and nintendo went the simple route with a motion device on a much weaker set of hardware. there's a lot of debate about what makes the wii appeal so much to so many people and it looks like 4 years of unstoppable success the wii's sales are finally beginning to slow. Still it's hard to ignore how nintendo has influenced the other two leading competitors in the console market. However I do think that statement describes the modern entertainment perfectly though.

with that said though I would love to see an in depth interview with actual developers of these games , I imagine the difficulties and challenges they face must be at least a tad bit different than other developers.

We've been debating this this week here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/NicholasLovell/20100908/5924/Snobbish_Arrogant_an
d_Elitist__Why_Attitudes_to_Zynga_Suck.php

Social games are for the most part, lowest common denominator game making. If it wasn't painfully obvious that this is the standard M.O. for about 90% of the games out there, then it should be now.

This isn't to say that they have to be like this.

This is the ultimate manifestation of game development using the software development culture.

Time to move to a free agent / art patronage culture - as with film, architecture, music, visual arts (etc)...

Are games an art form (yes, with a commercial upside), or only a type of crack cocaine that we use to pry money from people?

The Force is strong with this one. But he does not come quite close to Bobby Kotick, though.

The IP Laws need to change to prevent this type of abuse and exploitation. Innovation needs to be the best profitable approach, not cunning.

So Zynga is the stock market incarnate on facebook. Playdom has to be just as bad... look at their prices... like $10 for a little virtual item that does almost nothing, the hell??

i think this statement is self evident... while calling it evil may be a bit skewed, cloning in this industry is wide spread. of course they don't want innovation, any new idea introduced by one company quickly gets copied..

i'm not supporting this, but it's been the culture of social games pretty much since they got coined as such.. take the completion bar.. the one that every game has now. "Bookmark, like, etc.." a few months ago i'd never seen that before but then suddenly every game i visited after a long break had this bar appear.. and for the time being it works.

these companies will continue to do this till the market demands something different. regardless of how some of us feel about the argument of "they are not even real games" is pointless because as long as the market supports it, this culture will continue.

What this really boils down to is how the videogame industry views games. If games are a commodity, like wingnuts or dvd players, then the way to succeed is to streamline your production, cut corners wherever you can and try to make a product that is either slightly better, slightly cheaper or slightly more well known than that of your competitor. If, however, you think of videogames as a creative works, such as a painting or a novel, then the way to succeed is to create something that expresses your idea. It is something that you want to be as well-made as it can be, within practical constraints. If you look at it one way, Zynga is doing things the sensible way. If you look at it another way, they are everything that's wrong with the videogame industry.

One thing to note is that these two philosophies have very different long-term business models. The latter model's profitability is based upon the companies ability to keep producing quality works. With the former, however, profitability only lasts until the market is saturated. Once everyone makes roughly the same product, profit margins are minimal, as companies can only get ahead by edging out the competition by a few cents.

Personally, I'd rather work in a creative setting than on an assembly line.

As far as I can see, the various social game developers are all copying each other -- Zynga's hardly the only one taking that approach.

What's sad is that they're only cloning the little features. I may just not have seen it, but it doesn't appear that any of the major players is innovating in that space with novel ways of connecting friends through games. It's just interface tweaks covering the same set of features.

There's nothing innately evil about that. Microsoft has managed to succeed for many years by seeing what products are popular and then doing them better. (Although sometimes that backfires, as with Java, sometimes it works very well, as with Internet Explorer.) I would also say that Blizzard did exactly this with World of Warcraft -- they didn't innovate in any significant area; they used the "second-mover advantage" to take what worked in other MMOs and simplify and streamline those features. So has Zynga.

Basically, Zynga : FarmVille :: Blizzard : WoW. Is Blizzard evil?

I'd say no, and the same for Zynga. But at the same time, that lack of innovation does make their products not very interesting to me, and potentially not very helpful toward growing their respective game genres over the long term. (Short term, certainly; long term...?)

The good news is that the relatively low cost of getting a game up in the social gaming arena should allow for more developers to try more new ideas. Of course, the downside there is that it gets harder to find good games amid all the quick hacks, or -- as Apple recently put it with their usual tactlessness -- "amateur hour."

But better an active marketplace than a stagnant one.

@tim c., what you say about the honor system is exactly why there are very enforceable laws including copyright (which is IP), patent, and trademark. we will be hard pressed not to find every successful corporation and company agressively protecting their rights using the aforementioned.

Social games are a fad. They will disappear as fast as they came. In 12 months we'll be back to leveraging off a small number of franchises to a willing and purchase proven console/pc base after the social networkers have long lost interest in milking virtual cows.

How many books and films have plagiarised the ideas if not the words of others? Hell, even Shakespeare stole Romeo & Juliet from West Side Story.* this is utterly disputable, but profit will motivate the worst in some. Name and Shame can work sometimes, as can a benevolent supporter of the original creator stumping up legal fees. However, we should be addressing copyright not patents. Now THERE is broken legislation!

* overheard bus conversation