The Trademark Bullies Strike Again

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 22, 2014

When I heard that the Candy Crush Saga creators actually hired gambling industry experts as consultants to help them extract the maximum amount of money from their players, I thought they were real scumbuckets.

Apparently, that comparison was completely unfair to actual scumbuckets.

Now they have gone and trademarks words commonly used by games.

Like “Candy.”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if your game has the word “candy” in it (at least in the title), you may be screwed.

Of course, they claim that it’s only to protect themselves from obvious attempts by unscrupulous developers to fool customers into getting the wrong game on the app store. Yeah. Nice try. I can feel their pain, and almost be understanding, but it appears they are relentlessly going on the attack.

And then… they also grabbed the word “Saga.” And went on the attack. The really cool recently-released indie RPG “The Banner Saga“?  While it’s laughable that they could claim that this strategy RPG based on Norse mythology could be confused with a colorful puzzle game about candy,  this is no joke. This happened.

During my years of “indie evangelism” (back when nobody knew what “indie” was), I’d frequently take the big publishers to task for acting like soulless organizations of suits. When EA spokespeople brag about how the rising cost of making games for next-gen machines makes it impossible for indies to compete against them ever again (yeah, that was LAST gen), it’s great fun to see them hoisted by their own petard. We still make lots of jokes about them, even though they are no longer quite the gatekeepers they once were.

But with few exceptions, I really don’t consider the big publishers “evil.” I know too many publishers – or rather, the people who work for publishers. Yeah, I’ve known some real douchebags who were in important positions at publishers, and some real clueless people at the top sometimes, but as a whole, they are still often staffed by people who do love games and have at least some level of enlightened self-interested care for their customers. Some folks who are dang passionate about gaming, and really know their stuff, and try to work within the system to make quality stuff.

To me, as an indie, they are – at worst – an obstacle. If that. Sometimes even a (distant) ally. Not an enemy.

Until they start pulling crap like this. Maybe I was too quick to turn a blind eye on Bethesda and the “Scrolls” crap, but this has got to stop. As indies, we don’t have much in the way of the primary weapon in this war – MONEY. And sadly, in a straight-up fight, even if the bad guys lose, the only winners are the lawyers.

But… we do have our own little forms of protest.

Like this. I am so doing this:

CANDY JAM

It’s a game jam (we love game jams!) with a theme of …. CANDY! With bonus points for all the other common words these evil schmucks are trying to monopolize via trademark.

The rules are simple: Make a game involving candies.

There’s really not a whole lot of point, other than to turn rage and frustration into something productive, and maybe draw a tiny bit of attention to the serious problem the hobby and industry are facing. It may be too late to save “Candy.” Or “Saga.”As one of the creators of the event, Laurent Raymond, states at The Escapist, “I have little ambition about the whole thing. We’re going to enjoy coding silly things, mock them, change a few minds and then everyone will forget the event as soon as it ends. I wish it would mean something but this is not the first time that it’s happened, and most of the time it’s handled by just letting the rage pass. We’ll just add fun to that rage for once.”

I’m also worried about an avalanche of common words getting trademarked. This is ridiculous, and gamers and game developers both are getting screwed here. How soon until every noun and verb in the English language is monopolized?

I am planning on participating in this event.

And if there’s anything else you can think of to raise awareness of this issue, to get the government to stop issuing these kinds of monopolies, please do so. This must stop.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism, Politics - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



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