socialmedian: Zynga Trademarks FishVille — Get Ready for a Big Aquarium Game

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Zynga Trademarks FishVille — Get Ready for a Big Aquarium Game

Submitted by Frinsen from Google Reader

Oct 13, 2009

Summary

In what can only be a gut-wrenching moment for the developers of aquarium simulations games like Happy Aquarium and My Fishbowl, Zynga received a trademark to the name “FishVille” last week. This almost certainly means that Zynga will launch a version of the game, and quite likely grow it quickly.

The trademark comes as the company enjoys the successful launch of Café World, a restaurant simulation that directly challenges Playfish’s Restaurant City. Café World grew by 10 million users in a week, through Zynga’s methods of cross-promotion with its other games, advertising on Facebook, and building increasingly high-quality game-play.

Café World itself follows Zynga’s launch of FarmVille, a farm simulation game that copies others, like Farm Town. And, before that, Mafia Wars, which copied Psycho Monkey’s Mob Wars, which itself was part of an intellectual property dispute with SGN. Copying is how things go in social gaming these days.