Tiny Tower maker NimbleBit and Bingo Blitz maker Buffalo Studios both took issue with overly familiar titles recently released by Zynga, making their complaints known through large infographics that show near-identical side-by-side screenshots. But Triple Town developer Spry Fox went a step further, actually filing a lawsuit (PDF ) against Yeti Town developer 6waves Lolapps, saying the latter company “unabashedly” cloned its popular social game. The lawsuit takes the matter away from the nebulous moral and ethical questions of what constitutes an “original” game idea to the codified legal realm of guilt and innocence. Yet the nature of copyright law as it applies to games, and the existing case law in the area, suggests Spry Fox has an uphill battle in protecting Triple Town in court.

The creator of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda will step down from his current position at Nintendo but remain with the company to work on smaller, more personal projects, Wired.com has learned.

In an exclusive interview with Wired.com on Wednesday, the 59-year-old head of Nintendo's game design department said that he will move away from supervising the development of massive games like this year's Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Super Mario 3D Land, passing the torch to the younger designers in the company and working on projects that won't take as long to complete.

"Inside our office, I've been recently declaring, 'I'm going to retire, I'm going to retire,'" Shigeru Miyamoto said through his interpreter. "I'm not saying that I'm going to retire from game development altogether. What I mean by retiring is, retiring from my current position."

"What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself," Miyamoto said. "Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small."

Miyamoto said that he's hoping to start work on a project in 2012, and hopefully show the game off publicly within the year.

"In other words, I'm not intending to start from things that require a five-year development time," he said.

Zynga, creator of games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Words with Friends, has filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to take the company public. The casual games giant hopes to raise $1 billion by selling stock. That may seem ambitious, but the filings note that the company enjoyed profits of over $392 million in 2010. The company shows no signs of slowing down, but the filing also reminds us just how much of Zynga’s business is directly dependent on Facebook.

“Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future,” the filing explains. “Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business and adversely affect the value of our Class A common stock.”

It’s a clear warning for investors: the company is in great shape when it comes to profits and growth, but it’s closely tied to a volatile and fast moving property in social media. Nothing about the future is assured.

Independent retro games retailer Good Old Games has spoken out about digital rights management (DRM), saying that it can actually drive gamers to piracy, rather than acting as a deterrent.

Speaking to bit-tech for a future feature about DRM in Custom PC, Good Old Games' PR and marketing manager, Lukasz Kukawski, said that the effectiveness of DRM as a piracy-deterrent was 'None, or close to none.'

'What I will say isn’t popular in the gaming industry,' says Kukawski, 'but in my opinion DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that. Would you rather spend $50 on a game that requires installing malware on your system, or to stay online all the time and crashes every time the connection goes down, or would you rather download a cracked version without all that hassle?'

According to Kukawski, the situation with restrictive DRM has reached the point where gamers often feel pushed into buying a game at full price, but then still download a cracked version to avoid the DRM. 'I know people that buy an original copy of the game just so they don't feel guilty,' says Kukawski, 'and then they will play a pirated version which is stripped of all DRM. That’s not how it should be. Let’s treat legitimate customers with respect and they will give that back.'

The rumors have been numerous: Nintendo has a new system that will be more powerful than the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360. The controller will include a large touch-screen. It will be out in 2012. While the particulars are still a mystery, Nintendo has confirmed that there is new system is on the way, and we'll be playing it at the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo.

"Nintendo Co., Ltd. has decided to launch in 2012 a system to succeed Wii, which the company has sold 86.01 million units on a consolidated shipment basis between its launch in 2006 and the end of March 2011," the company said in a statement. "We will show a playable model of the new system and announce more specifications at the E3 Expo, which will be held June 7-9, 2011, in Los Angeles."

An experimental game using the URL bar as the game screen.

My new guilty pleasure.