Surprising lack of actually qualified respondents but I'm not about to make a Reddit account to help out. Instead HN gets my reply. Worked at Zynga during "the good years" as both a programmer and a designer.

Launched game after game for our target audience, casual gamers. These are players who don't identify as gamers but probably play games for as many hours or more as those who do. These games were well-received. 4-5 star ratings, letters and gifts from players thanking us for making them feel less lonely at home or have a new way to connect with their grandkids or whatever.

On the flip side you are universally hated by self-identifying gamers who aren't even your target audience. And worse, you're hated by other professional devs in the industry. For a couple years at GDC I would walk around with my badge flipped or my employer obscured cuz it was better to make a first impression and _then_ reveal you worked for the dog. Eventually I would rep my employer proudly, even wearing obnoxious internally-gifted whatever-Ville shirts, just to ruffle feathers. This was the start of my growing resentment for self-identifying gamers, be they players or developers, which eventually led me to leave the industry.

Zynga was a "clone shop" because they understood that their target audience doesn't trade in mechanical novelty. Find something that already works, polish it, and extend it. That was the strategy. Game ideas are meaningless, literally every employee has a dozen good ones. Execution is all that matters. Your feathers are probably ruffled by now but we adopted this strategy from EA and the rest of AAA who do exactly this year after year for the very audience that condemned Zynga for it. You think all those open world games aren't really clones of Assassin's Creed? Cuz that's how they're all pitched. It's the game industry equivalent of "Uber for X". Everything is Assassin's Creed or Halo. Open world or on-rails. Chocolate or vanilla. Then you add the sprinkles ("this time they're toffee!") and ship it. Would you criticize Ben & Jerry's as a clone shop? I mean all they're doing is releasing the same ice cream over and over!

That should be enough pretext to answer the question. Obviously it feels like shit to work somewhere where people have decided you're cancer. But deep down you know they're wrong. There are plenty of ppl out there who enjoy your game, but they aren't the loudest ppl who write the public narrative. You're on your own to reconcile that. How I did it was to accept that self-identifying gamers are entitled brats who have no idea how the things they're critiquing actually work. I use the term 'self-identifying' so often because it's an important piece of the puzzle. These are ppl who consider playing games to be their thing, in the way that a Hot Topic shopper might consider dark clothes and Jack Skellington to be their thing. When you disrupt their internal reality, say by releasing a clone of Scrabble with more power-up tiles and a chat box, they feel like you are offending them and will now spend hours online spreading hate and misinformation. It's a little like politics.

I was pitching in on a mobile design for a game about collecting and raising dragons, cuz that was a hot mobile thing at the time, right around when the Tiny Tower debacle happened. To catch everyone up, Tiny Tower was a successful mobile game by a small indie studio. Zynga had released a clone called Dream Heights and the devs decided to weaponize the frothing self-identifying gamers in a FUD campaign to protect their game from a competitor. Pretty soon the Zynga version, which previously enjoyed 4 star rating and had a growing following of fans, got inundated with negative reviews from ppl who had no interest in the game at all. The company dropped the game because the target audience can't tell this is what happened. They just think the game is bad. Zynga actually winced pretty hard internally from this. It started cancelling other clones out of fear of a trend starting. In my opinion this was Zynga listening to the haters which is never the right thing to do. That dragon breeding game I was telling you about though; it was a clone so after nearly two years of development by a team of 40+ it was cancelled. When a game is cancelled before launch you can't really put it on your resume. If you're an artist you have to smuggle the art out of the company to use it in your portfolio, labeled as concept art or something. Obviously it would be better if two years of your life amounted to a name you could drop on your resume.

And ultimately that's what it feels like to work at a company after releasing a negatively received game. The frustration of being burned alive by a witch hunt mixed with the suffocating feeling that your career has stalled.

If there needs to be a moral to the story, it's to not let the entertainment you consume become your identity. It will make you a worse person.