I never made the mistake of seeing EA as a "friend" I'm as critical of the industry as I always was before this happened, though I am cheering for them in this conflict simply because I feel that within the limited context of this issue they happen to be right, and I do think their victory will benefit gaming... or at least has a chance to.
I will say that I think you underplay Zynga's effect on gaming though, if Zynga was just a producer of casual games for the lowest human denominator, there wouldn't have ever been an issue, after all serious gamers have lived alongside shovelware for a very long time, your "real" games were right accross the aisle from titles like "Alien Disco Safari" or "Cute Knight" for a very long time.
The issue with Zynga is that it's success and the way it's presented itself has contributed to the trend of major developers turning to low-grade shovelware. Rather than taking the risks in making a serious game, they realize they can make 200 small, derivitive games for the same price, and cover the losses for 199 of them if one manages to succeed. Angry Birds (Rovio) and other successful apps also contributed to this, but Zynga was responsible for getting the ball rolling and has pretty much been the guys to watch. Indeed the sheer amount of money to be made from garbage is why EA cares about Zynga's knockoffs. On a lot of respects Zynga corrupted EA even further, and EA is now trying to infect the "casual game" space and remove it's competition.
Basically, without Zynga getting the ball rolling, you wouldn't see so many developers talking about how gaming as we've grown to know it is dead, and "re organizing" to produce shovelware (though they rarely call it that). I also think Zynga can be blamed for the cash shops in the western market, Korean games and such had been doing this for a while, but it never really caught on in the western market, the "Ville" games demonstrated how addictive behavior in gamers can be exploited, if people were willing to pay a fortune to click cows more efficiently, the logic was to re-package it to exploit the same thing in other games, including the inclusion of barriers in a free game that render it more or less unenjoyable unless you invest increasingly larger amounts of money.
A good example of the problems would be the recent situation with Funcom. Funcom not only launched "The Secret World" with the overpriced cash shop, which I don't think would have been there if Zynga hadn't really gotten the trend rolling for this market, but when the game didn't perform to their expectations (unsurprising given how they duplicated pretty much every design mistake MMOs have made in recent memory), they immediatly decided to lay off staff and reform with the intent of producing "smaller" games, the one being mentioned is an ultra-casual affair based on Lego minifigures... and if that sounds like a cutesy casual game with the added demon of a product tie in, your absolutly correct. This in direct opposition to Funcom taking it's mild success (by all accounts the game made money, it just didn't make as much as they expected by retaining players), learning from it's mistakes, dusting themselves off, and going ahead with their next big product... which is what would have happened if there wasn't a gold rush on the casual market.
Give it time, in a few years let's see how many real games there are left. They probably won't ever totally disappear, but you'll notice just about everyone is re-structuring for that (it takes time to actually have an influance) being the primary focus.
Now granted, I consider Zynga a big evil, as big as EA, but from a differant direction, but EA taking them down isn't going to accomplish much as their damage is done. At the most they can be deprived of success and prevented from potentially doing anything else.
To sort of invoke Godwin's Law, in this relationship EA is like a group of Neo-Nazis, they are imitating the evil of others and arguably bringing it to new extremes. Zynga is like Hitler and the actual Nazis, they were the ones that started the evil philsophy and trends that other, arguably more obnoxious, groups are running with. Not a perfect analogy, but the point is that EA has never been great at the creative process, even when it comes to business (as you pointed out), Zynga on the other hand is one of the groups that helped create the morass of suck that the gaming industry is sinking into.
I will say that I think you underplay Zynga's effect on gaming though, if Zynga was just a producer of casual games for the lowest human denominator, there wouldn't have ever been an issue, after all serious gamers have lived alongside shovelware for a very long time, your "real" games were right accross the aisle from titles like "Alien Disco Safari" or "Cute Knight" for a very long time.
The issue with Zynga is that it's success and the way it's presented itself has contributed to the trend of major developers turning to low-grade shovelware. Rather than taking the risks in making a serious game, they realize they can make 200 small, derivitive games for the same price, and cover the losses for 199 of them if one manages to succeed. Angry Birds (Rovio) and other successful apps also contributed to this, but Zynga was responsible for getting the ball rolling and has pretty much been the guys to watch. Indeed the sheer amount of money to be made from garbage is why EA cares about Zynga's knockoffs. On a lot of respects Zynga corrupted EA even further, and EA is now trying to infect the "casual game" space and remove it's competition.
Basically, without Zynga getting the ball rolling, you wouldn't see so many developers talking about how gaming as we've grown to know it is dead, and "re organizing" to produce shovelware (though they rarely call it that). I also think Zynga can be blamed for the cash shops in the western market, Korean games and such had been doing this for a while, but it never really caught on in the western market, the "Ville" games demonstrated how addictive behavior in gamers can be exploited, if people were willing to pay a fortune to click cows more efficiently, the logic was to re-package it to exploit the same thing in other games, including the inclusion of barriers in a free game that render it more or less unenjoyable unless you invest increasingly larger amounts of money.
A good example of the problems would be the recent situation with Funcom. Funcom not only launched "The Secret World" with the overpriced cash shop, which I don't think would have been there if Zynga hadn't really gotten the trend rolling for this market, but when the game didn't perform to their expectations (unsurprising given how they duplicated pretty much every design mistake MMOs have made in recent memory), they immediatly decided to lay off staff and reform with the intent of producing "smaller" games, the one being mentioned is an ultra-casual affair based on Lego minifigures... and if that sounds like a cutesy casual game with the added demon of a product tie in, your absolutly correct. This in direct opposition to Funcom taking it's mild success (by all accounts the game made money, it just didn't make as much as they expected by retaining players), learning from it's mistakes, dusting themselves off, and going ahead with their next big product... which is what would have happened if there wasn't a gold rush on the casual market.
Give it time, in a few years let's see how many real games there are left. They probably won't ever totally disappear, but you'll notice just about everyone is re-structuring for that (it takes time to actually have an influance) being the primary focus.
Now granted, I consider Zynga a big evil, as big as EA, but from a differant direction, but EA taking them down isn't going to accomplish much as their damage is done. At the most they can be deprived of success and prevented from potentially doing anything else.
To sort of invoke Godwin's Law, in this relationship EA is like a group of Neo-Nazis, they are imitating the evil of others and arguably bringing it to new extremes. Zynga is like Hitler and the actual Nazis, they were the ones that started the evil philsophy and trends that other, arguably more obnoxious, groups are running with. Not a perfect analogy, but the point is that EA has never been great at the creative process, even when it comes to business (as you pointed out), Zynga on the other hand is one of the groups that helped create the morass of suck that the gaming industry is sinking into.
