Zynga, the social gaming developer and Facebook’s most-loyal friend, has filed a counter-suit against the gaming veterans over at Electronic Arts (EA). Allthingsd report the suit is in relation to EA allegedly violating anti-trust laws by preventing employees seeing what all the fuss is about and moving to Zynga. The firm’s general counsel Reggie Davis released a statement, which read: “Today we responded to EA’s claims, which we believe have no merit. We also filed a counterclaim which addresses actions by EA we believe to be anticompetitive and unlawful business practices, including legal threats and demands for no-hire agreements.”
The war of words erupted when EA accused Zynga of copying the Sims and creating the nowhere-near-as-good CityVille. Zynga made sure they, yet again, denied this is the case while issuing this countersuit and went even further by describing parts of the EA suit as “redundant, immaterial, impertinent and/or scandalous matter that is unfairly prejudicial to Zynga”.
EA released their own official reply to the claims from Zynga, and stated: “This is a predictable subterfuge aimed at diverting attention from Zynga’s persistent plagiarism of other artists and studios. Zynga would be better served trying to hold onto the shrinking number of employees they’ve got, rather than suing to acquire more.”
You get the feeling this is the social gaming industry’s equivalent of an Apple v Samsung battle in that it’s likely to run and run and run in the same ‘bitch-fight’ way the technology patent war did. How do you tell who’s winning…the share prices of course
How about those numbers…
Friday’s close saw Zynga rise by an uncharacteristic 7.43 percent to leave the price at $3.18 – well short of the 52-week high of $14.69. A rise is a rise though, right?
EA meanwhile recorded a very small gain by 1.83 percent to $14.50. It will be interesting to see what the market thinks when it wakes up in a few hours time.
