I think most people here on hacker news understand that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and it's execution that counts. There are -plenty- of things to dislike about Zygna before complaining about the fact that FarmWhatzit works just like Uncle Bob's MyFarmifier or whatever. "But x did it first" arguments on simple things that anybody could up with simply don't help anything in any way.
I think you should read more about exactly what the parent post is referring to. Zynga's history of one of blatent theft -- there is a hair's breadth between their games and the people whose originals they ripped off.
It's a -facebook- game. See: Myspace, Friendster, Six Degrees.
I'm familiar with the fact that Zygna's web based farm simulator plays like somebody else's web based farm simulator. But that's a very similar argument to "bing is just like google is like altavista is like yahoo" - you type in a search box, you get back a list of web pages, every time one adds a feature the others do same.
Also: If you come up with a better dating site tomorrow, should you need to apologize to match.com? Many of us here are hoping to come up with a better mousetrap, and have no intention of saying "oh, well, I guess Acme made mousetraps first." We intend to build a better mousetrap. If we succeed, if Acme has any brains they will do likewise and everybody wins.
So I just don't think 'they are stealing ideas' is the right grounds to assault them on. If the idea mattered enough, the first fake farm crop clicker would have won.
Much better places to start:
"It's not a game", "wall spam gets in the way of real friendships", "their founder bragged about getting profitable off the evilest ads they could find", "they took away options from employees", "all of their games are reskins of the same exact thing", and "is there an ethical bound where speeding up timers in a virtual click thing is charging too much for too little? (zygna vip = smurfberries = cow clicker?)"
I disagree. Your analogy doesn't work. If you took DOOM, re-created the graphics in slightly different colors and styles because you didn't want to get sued for copyright infringement, but implemented the exact game mechanics, the story, controls, and all of the major concepts of the game, and called it FLOOM, you'd be crossing the line in a way you are not by simply creating a search engine.
This is basically Zynga's methodology for creating products that they've clearly used a number of times with clear evidence. I don't think they see themselves in the business of designing games since they leave that to the companies they steal them from.
I think it's a false dilemma to say that we shouldn't criticize Zynga for this because it comes at the cost of being able to criticize them for other reasons. For some, this is just as an important reason (if not more important) than the ones you listed.
