You know when Hollywood cons you into thinking a character is lovely and warm before revealing them to be a cold calculating villain by the end of the film?

Well, if allegations from an anonymous source are to be believed, some would say FarmVille developer Zynga could be the real-world equivalent.

An ex-employee of the FarmVille team has recounted Zynga boss Mark Pincus' alleged words: "I don't [LIFTED] want innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

Interviews conducted by SF Weekly with several former Zynga workers apparently indicated that stealing other companies' game ideas and then using the company's market clout to crowd out the games' originators was the norm.

The former employee went on to reveal Zynga's unofficial company motto of "Do Evil", which is an adaptation of Google's much friendlier "Don't Be Evil".

"I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I've run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach," the source said.

"I've tried my best to make sure that friends don't let friends work at Zynga."

FarmVille became popular via social networking on Facebook along with games like Mafia Wars, also developed by Zynga.

They're simple apps but social network gaming could be getting a whole lot more complex since Facebook is searching for a games industry veteran to take the platform further in that direction.

I wouldn't play that piece of crap anyway.

They're simply apps made to generate income through buying extras. There's actually not a lot of 'gaming' involved IMO.

I do not care for online games, far too time consuming. Though the company policy does sound like many others. Microsoft and Apple could be said to follow similar strategies, though they do actually innovate at times. The iPod was not novel just done better than the rest. Same for the iPhone. Windows 7 is not that novel it takes a lot of ideas from OSX and incorporates them.

FarmVille and Mafia Wars (which I have on the iPHone but not touched for a while) are pretty much button pressing exercises. I tried FarmVille on FaceBook for a while and found that after a few days I was doing the same old thing, so I stopped.

Here’s the Wiki article on Zynga.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga