Activision Founder Blames Zynga for Social Game Reputation

One of the co-founders of one of the biggest publishers in the video game space has blamed Zynga for the bad reputation of the casual games genre and suggested that they could have tough times in the near future.

David Crane, who is one of the co-founders of Activision and has created Pitfall, has told Game Informer that, “Ten years ago everyone was playing these kinds of games and now everyone forgot they existed just because they’re on phones now. I kind of feel like I’ve always made casual games. I make games for people who like to have fun and enjoy games on any level. Games are about diversion; that’s very casual.”

He added, “If you ask someone what they thought a casual game was a few years ago, they might have said something like Angry Birds. Now they’ll probably say something like Farmville. I don’t like to lump those social games in with casual games. I think it’s those Zynga-like games that give the ‘casual’ market a bad name.”

Zynga has recently made the headlines for those negative reasons: the lawsuit that Electronic Arts has brought against it because of the similarities between The Sims Social and The Vile and the drop in share price that has been associated with less than impressive financial results.

Electronic Arts has taken Zynga to court because of copyright issues and says that the social games developer needs to stop creating games that freely copy ideas from other developers.

Some analysts believe that EA will have a tough time proving the copyright charges and that the two companies will settle before the legal action comes in front of a jury.

The drop in share price has prompted Zynga to announce plans to enter the real money games market and the company also has long term plans to separate its core infrastructure from that of the social platform Facebook.