Remember when EA sued Zynga, saying that The Ville was “largely indistinguishable” from The Sims Social? Zynga have hit back over the weekend, and even gone so far as to accuse EA games of being angry about their own failures to understand the casual market on the deep level Zynga clearly does.

“EA’s lawsuit ultimately rests on the implausible assumption that Zynga would launch a ‘copy’ of a game that had failed months before Zynga released its own game,” reads just one of the many venemously barbed lines in Zynga’s call for a trial by jury.

“By the time Zynga launched The Ville, the user base for EA’s The Sims Social had plummeted, and Zynga is informed and believes that EA already had relegated the game to its India Studio where EA games in decline are sent to be inexpensively maintained and ultimately discontinued.”

Zynga then goes on to claim that EA does not own and can not copyright things like “sitting on a couch watching TV, taking a shower, and going to sleep in a bed”. EA has responded to the counter-suit by calling it “predictable subterfuge aimed at diverting attention from Zynga’s persistent plagiarism of other artists and studios”. Snap.

Source: Joystiq

The title says it all really: EA are suing Zynga, claiming that they’ve ripped off EA’s Facebook game, Sims Social, with their Facebook game, The Ville. Zynga being accused of being glorified rip-off merchants isn’t exactly the most groundbreaking claim, but this is the first time a company as brutally large and financially well-supported as EA has ever challenged them.

EA spells the case out in their press release, which says “the infringement of The Sims Social was unmistakable to those of us at Maxis as well as to players and the industry at large,” and “the copying was so comprehensive that the two games are, to an uninitiated observer, largely indistinguishable”. Stop beating around the bush EA, tell us what you really think!

Source: EA (thanks to PalZer0 for the tip)