The TechCrunch office pool predicted Vostu would respond to the Zynga lawsuit alleging that Vostu’s entire business is basically to copy every single thing Zynga does in one of two ways. They’d either use the “I know you are but what am I defense,” or just a more straightforward “It wasn’t me” approach.
It turns out they just did both.
Vostu’s statement:
Zynga has been accused of copying so many games [Editor note: the "I know you are but what am I" defense"] that they’ve sadly lost the ability to recognize games like ours that are chock full of original content and have been independently created [Editor Note: the "It Wasn't Me" defense]. Vostu has 500 brilliant employees working night and day making hand drawings and writing proprietary code for online games that our 35 million users worldwide enjoy. Zynga’s anti-competitive effort to bully us with a frivolous lawsuit — especially when we have some of the same key investors — is pathetic. While Zynga plays games with the legal process we will continue focusing on using our substantial resources to create games that entertain our customers.”
Attribution to company spokesman Davidson Goldin
As i mentioned in our previous post, Zynga’s biggest weakness here is that they’ve “borrowed” game ideas from others, and have had to settle lawsuits because of it.
But Zynga, which has done some audacious things in the past, has never had the chutzpah to not only copy a game idea, but copy every aspect of the game design and mechanics as well. Take a gander at the side by side screenshots in the lawsuit complaint attached to our original post. There just isn’t a whole lot left to say.
My take: Vostu can’t win this lawsuit. I mean, they even copied the bugs in Zynga’s games.
Zynga was founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus and is named for his late American Bulldog, Zinga. Loyal and spirited, Zinga’s name is a nod to a legendary African warrior queen. The early supporting founding team included Eric Schiermeyer, Michael Luxton, Justin Waldron, Kyle Stewart, Scott Dale, John Doerr, Steve Schoettler, Kevin Hagan, and Andrew Trader. Zynga’s mission is connecting the world through games. Everyday millions of people interact with their friends and express their unique personalities through our...
Vostu is a social gaming company which was launched in May 2007. Initially a social network for Latin America with a strong presence in Brazil, the company developed and launched its first succesful social game in June 2009 under the title “Joga Craque”, a soccer-focused RPG for Brazilian players. It then launched a version of the same game on the popular Brazilian social network Orkut in October 2009. More recently, Vostu launched a farming game on Orkut called “Mini Fazenda”...
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