I think this as a terrible way to look at people and the world. People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family. Social gaming isn't a "ponzi scheme" -- you can think its a waste of time, you can think Zynga's corporate policies were bad, but at the end of the day a bunch of people who just wanted to make money building things just lost their jobs.
I'm not so sure they deserve the sympathy though. Nearly every game released for the past several years has been a literal clone of another game- usually so wholesale, so completely devoid of any innovation or new content, that it was indistinguishable to the lay man.
When you're literally being told to copy another company to create your product, so brashly? You honestly deserve what's coming to you. I'm okay if you try to innovate at least a little, but they never did. They just used their platform and size to bully smaller companies(and sometimes, stupidly, larger companies like EA) into irrelevance.
I'm tempted to agree with you. "They're just trying to support their family" can only be an acceptable excuse up to a point. I don't know if Zynga reached that point or not. I just think it's important to keep in mind that you can only do so much evil before "providing for your family" is no longer a valid excuse.
Of course, this all sounds ridiculous in comparison to "real" evil, like mass murder. So I'm also tempted to disagree ;).
> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.
No, these people were seduced by promises of a big payday for copying other people's work -- plain and simple. There are so many tech and gaming companies to work for in Silicon Valley that I just don't believe it's possible to pick the most egregious one simply by accident.
Zynga has poached a lot of talent from the real game industry. People don't need to resign and join Zynga - it's a choice they've made. And with the requirements Zynga had - even if you had been unemployed and got an offer from Zynga you could get another one everywhere else: they had not been exactly scrapping the bottom of the barrel, quite the opposite.
I'm curious as to how were they able to poach. Money, equity, working conditions, all of these, none of these...?
Working conditions in some of the big companies in the real games industry sound pretty bad to me, but I am only going on lazy reading of articles like "EA spouse", I have no experience in the industry itself. I think I'd be pretty outraged to be on a Farmville death march, for sure.
I'd guess equity and money. Zynga does not seem to have conditions different from EA (not surprisingly as it's managed by the same people) and EA is not really able to poach somebody with its working conditions.
> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.
That may apply to the administrative staff, or people in sales and marketing. Maybe even managers.
But not to the developers that had options and chose money over ethics. It doesn't make them "evil", but it puts them very low on the list of people to feel sorry for.
