Actually, it makes plenty of sense -- if what you're after is talented and thoughtful people.

Here's a guy who has enough mojo that he produced a well-reviewed game on his own. That's exactly the kind of person I like to hire because they can think broadly about the work in a way that many people can't. Zynga obviously doesn't want employees devoting significant time to competing with them. But leaving the game up does no harm. So they negotiate the exception, file the paragraph away for when this comes up again, and everybody's happy.

What we learn from this is that they don't really want people this smart and creative. They want somebody mindlessly obedient who will go and do the dubious things Zynga does.

True. But look at it from the perspective of the big company - they thrive on process more than empowerment and creativity. Btw, don't get me wrong, I am not defending Zynga. I lost all respec for that company after they asked some early employees to turn over their shares because they did not deserve as much as they held.

I think it depends on what you mean by "thrive". Humans with power like to consolidate power and suppress the emergence of threats to their power. But lack of innovation (or ability to even recognize the need for innovation) is a major killer of corporations in the long term.

So I think it's more accurate to say that managers thrive on process more than empowerment, because a lot of companies are functionally equivalent to feudal empires in their social structure.

I call bullshit. A contact is always between separate parties and is always able to be adjusted and changed. Their 'you don't matter enough for us to take your needs into account' approach is totally reflective of their culture of behaving badly, if they valued the team as people not just numbers there is no way the few dollars it would have cost a lawyer to clarify the intent of the wording of a single section of a single contract would not have been totally reasonable.

I'd also say that the expected cost of recruiting a new programmer to replace him - assuming they want to do so - is likely to be significantly more expensive in both money and elapsed time than negotiating the contract addendum.

Of course, refusing to negotiate has the effect of establishing a particular kind of power relationship with the potential employee, which could be one of their goals.

That's the problem. They just didn't care enough to accommodate the change. If they really wanted the guy they would have said ok. But I guess he was just a number for Zynga and not a human being and valuable team member. While I understand why it doesn't make sense for a big company to be flexible in such negotiations I still find it sad that companies don't value enough the talent that comes their way.

Every company that has given me an offer has been willing to modify my contract to some extent, and I don't think I'm special. This includes big game development start ups, established independent studios and developers owned by large publishers. Having a list of exclusions, especially for preexisting work, is standard in the game industry afaik and doesn't require special requests in most cases.

I means they wanted you on the team. We also do the same and accept custom requests because we want the people to join our company. We are not indifferent to people. Fo some companies, though, especially those more focused on financial engineering than creating customer value prefer the my way or the highway approach. As I said in another comment for hem you are just a number.