Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

The King.com “Saga” gets funnier and funnier

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 27, 2014

sg-00-menuSo you know how King.com was claiming that their efforts to trademark (and monopolize) the words “Candy” and “Saga”  for videogames were supposedly to protect themselves from evil cloners just trying to cash in on their IP rights?

Well, they weren’t wrong. There are some unethical, despicable douchebags who will blatantly do that, and worse, daring any other company to call them on it. Like…

Like themselves. King.com is one of the prime offenders.

The story is pretty bad, if you didn’t check out the link. When a potential partner pulled their game to go with another partner, King.com just out-and-out copied their game, only with far more blatantly “borrowed” content from Pac-Man.

pa-00-menuOf course, since this announcement came out, and in light of the furor over their “trademark-trolling,” King.com has now removed their cloned game, “Pac-Avoid,” from their virtual arcade, in a lame attempt to either hide the evidence or demonstrate their newfound respect for IP rights. Or both.

And then there’s the whole “The Banner Saga” thing. Remember how their PR claimed that they weren’t trying to prevent The Banner Saga from using the name, and also explaining that no, they aren’t making any claim that Stoic was trying to horn in on their IP or capitalize on their success?

Well, um, about that…

They are lying. Their legal paperwork says otherwise.

Especially when it claims that the title is “deceptively similar” their own.

Like I said last week – these folks (and people like them) are evil. I don’t know another word for it. I know – these days, that’s a word we tend to reserve exclusively for scenery-chewing movie villains, mass murderers, and politicians we disagree with. But if I were to open up the ol’ D&D books and pick an alignment for ’em, it would have to be somewhere in the “evil” third of the chart. They unethically, immorally, and arguably illegally flaunted their ability to get away with abusing others (and their customers, IMO, but that’s just me). Then, once they built up enough of an empire doing so, they turned around and attempted to subvert the law they so often violated (in spirit if not in letter, but certainly outside the bounds of enforcement for those without money) and stomp on the freedom of other game makers. Those with less money but more scruples are the worst hurt.

I am definitely in favor of protecting IP rights (although I do recognize that perhaps the laws in most countries granting those protections are… weird, difficult to enforce, and too often subverted to favor the moneyed). Those who craft with words, images, music, etc. deserve the same kind of protection – and the ability to make a living from their labors – as those who build with metal, wood, plastic, silicon, and so forth. But when copyright is too weak and unenforceable to offer much protection for anybody, and trademark can be applied so broadly by those with deep pockets, I think the existing body of law is failing in the digital age.


Filed Under: Biz, Politics - Comments: 8 Comments to Read



  • Gregory Avery-Weir said,

    Calling them “evil” is dangerous. Certainly they’re doing evil things, but I suspect that the people making these decisions are normal folks who are generally good people who have mistakenly justified their actions as acceptable.

    If we start thinking of people who do evil things as fundamentally evil it makes it easier to let ourselves do evil things; after all, we’re not evil, so we’ll totally be able to do this stuff “right.” They’re probably normal people who have set up this elaborate system of evil behavior in such a way that they can go home at night and never think about how selfish and disrespectful their actions are.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Or to look at it the other way around – we avoid calling a spade a spade because we recognize it within ourselves, and by calling them “evil” we have to take a good, hard look at ourselves, and maybe make changes to not only our behavior, but possibly our worldview.

    There’s a whole crapload of gray area, and I’m not going to pretend I am without sin myself, but there’s a point where they’ve gone beyond the pale, and I believe they are there. Maybe I’ll be convinced otherwise as new information comes to light, but so far it’s coming up pretty rotten. Maybe not “knowingly dump toxic chemicals into the water supply because we don’t believe we’ll get caught” rotten, but still pretty rotten when people’s livelihoods are on the line.

  • McTeddy said,

    “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.” Albert Einstein

    Why do humans have to go and break things? No matter how good the intentions of something like IP laws… SOMEONE will abuse it.

    Sigh… I wanted sooooo much to believe they weren’t trolling. I wanted to believe that they weren’t really trying to screw indies. I wanted to believe that they were just being a business and doing business things.

    I don’t know whether they are evil or just ***holes… but I do know humanity just sucks. We can’t be trusted with any good things.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    They are papering over things now. With the “Pac-Avoid” game, they are explaining now that they are shocked, SHOCKED to discover that the game they commissioned was such a blatant violation of IP rights.

    http://youtu.be/SjbPi00k_ME

    It’s an age-old practice. You are a ruthless, predatory douchebag on your way up, then buy yourself respectability with your ill-gotten gains.

  • JT said,

    I’ve told all of my friends and family about what was going on, and have secured from a number of them a willingness to put away their Candy Crush toys and stop patronizing King’s games. I think that if there is going to be any kind of “justice” and goodness to combat this kind of evil (and I’m in agreement with RampantCoyote, here; unbridled selfishness and greed, and a willingness to do anything you feel you can get away with to sate it, is evil), we have to stop relying on massive, corrupt institutions such as US trademark and copyright law (notoriously skewed in favor of the big guys) and start relying on the power that we the people ultimately have: our consumer dollars. The free internet (for now) aids us in this. Despicable @$$holes like King do not deserve our money, and the more people are made aware of this the better off everyone will be.

  • Digital Munch said,

    It’s a dog eats dog world. The richer company with the bigger influence always wins.

  • Anon said,

    “They unethically, immorally, and arguably illegally flaunted their ability to get away with abusing others (and their customers, IMO, but that’s just me). Then, once they built up enough of an empire doing so, they turned around and attempted to subvert the law they so often violated (in spirit if not in letter, but certainly outside the bounds of enforcement for those without money) and stomp on the freedom of other game makers. Those with less money but more scruples are the worst hurt.”

    For a moment I though you were talking about the mafia…

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Funny, that…

    Maybe the magnitude of the actions are different, but the approach and mindset might not be all that different…

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