Exactly. But what I am disheartened about more is that the general SV VC and Tech communities appear to be ok with that as well.

This sentence really spelled it out:

"We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality."

The evolution Pincus is justifying here is taking a known game and making it free, or social or (in his mind) higher quality.

He is admitting right there to effectively "We evolve games by stealing them and making them work on our facebook delivery platform"

And calls it "innovation"

That is plain despicable.

Anecdotal, but many of the people I've met in the SV tech community don't respect Zynga at all.

Let's make that statement only a hair more general:

> We evolve genres by making [apps] free, ..., accessible, and highest quality.

This is arguably what Internet Explorer did to Netscape. The "genre" of web browsers did, in fact, evolve quite a bit in response.

Competition in an application space is good. Even in games. Look at how many tower defense or match-3 games there are. If you can make a better one, I'll play it.

Case in point, Zynga's "Words With Friends". It is the best version of online Scrabble I've played.

(Apparently it was developed by Newtoy and acquired by Zynga. And in my humble opinion, Zynga's "improvements" over the past year have had nothing to do with "evolving high quality", but are fairly blatant attempts to wrangle cash and facebook information out of me. But that's another story.)

However if you make a feature-by-feature copy of GemCraft, I'm not going to think much of you. And that seems to be what Zynga did here. They didn't build a better mousetrap, they build the exact same mousetrap and used their market position to grift Nimblebit's success.

I disagree with the comparison; IE to NS was ONE app.

This is an industry of blatant copying.

The "genre" you speak of is so shallow - whereas the "genre" of online/mobile games is a fucking galaxy by comparison.

Whenever I hear "higher quality" with no explanation of where or how that higher quality comes about my BS radar immediately starts going off. "Adding value" and "evolving" and "making X higher quality" are all phrases that have recently begun to lose all meaning and now sound like cliche corporate bullshit. Explain the how/where and I'll believe. Oh, and it's very easily to tell when you're being sincere so if a company uses it they'd better mean it or not say it at all.