Zynga sues over copycat of its puzzle game Screw Jam

Zynga is arguing that AdOne, with its copycat game, did not just create “the basic concept of a casual screw puzzle game,” of which there are plenty on the mobile market, but instead designed Screw Pin Jam Puzzle to look and feel like Screw Jam. Across the lawsuit, Zynga’s lawyers lay out the similarities: They use an allegedly identical tool box icon on the top of the screen, similar pastel colors, and allegedly copied the user interface and game progression.

The confusion between the two games, according to Zynga, is harming the company: Screw Jam is a free game and it needs players to purchase stuff in-app; they can’t if they’re moving on to an identical game. Though Screw Jam has financially overshadowed Screw Pin Jam Puzzle, it appears that the alleged knockoff is the more popular app on the Google Play store: It has 10 million downloads for Screw Jam’s one million.

Zynga wants the court to force AdOne to take the game down and, of course, award financial compensation. Crucially, Zynga did not invent the genre or game type, which has players unscrewing bolts to solve puzzles — it’s a growing genre in its own right.

Beyond just screw puzzles, this sort of thing happens a lot on mobile game stores. One developer will stumble on a massive, viral hit game and others will rush to flood the market with copycats. Due to the simple nature of some of these hyper casual games, copycats are relatively quick to reproduce. Rollic Games was named in a 2020 lawsuit for copying another studio’s wood-carving simulator. Rollic lost that lawsuit, forcing the company to pay a fine and remove the app from sale in France. Earlier, in 2018, Voodoo itself was accused by Donut County creator Ben Esposito of copying his then-upcoming game Donut County.

Polygon has reached out to Zynga and AdOne for comment.