Dream Heights by Zynga

Zynga faced a firestorm of criticism in late January when it released Dream Heights in the Canadian App Store. The controversy revolved around the app’s striking similarity to Apple’s 2011 iPhone Game of the Year ‘Tiny Tower’ by NimbleBit (see our story here). Today, Dream Heights hit the U.S. App Store and with it another likely round of controversy.

In response to NimbleBit and other people critical of Dream Heights, Zynga’s CEO, Mark Pincus, sent a memo to employees day after the controversy exploded. Part of the memo included the following:

“We don’t need to be first to market. We need to be the best to market. There are genres that we’re going to enter because we know our players are interested in them and because we want and need to be where players are. We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality.

You should be careful not to throw stones when you live in glass towers. When you pull the lens back, you saw that their tower game looked similar to five other tower games going all the way back to SimTower in the early 1990s.”

The delay in launching the app in the U.S. App Store after its debut in the Canadian App Store three weeks ago may have been a calculated move by Zynga to let the controversy die down. In addition, Zynga chose to release the app on a Monday, one of the slowest days for app releases, instead of on a Thursday when the most promising apps are released by big app makers.

App Store link: Dream Heights
Other apps by Zynga