The recent news that King.com, the marker of Candy Crush Saga, has trademarked the word “candy,” and is aggressively pursuing perceived violaters, is kind of douche-y. One small, independent developer may have seen it coming a few years ago.
This story is being re-posted by us, but you can find the original story at Junkyard Sam. We thank Mattew Cox, UI/UX Artist and Experience Designer, for allowing us to share this story. King.com’s so-called Intellectual Property and its trolling of its perceived rights disgusts us.
King.com (makers of Candy Crush Saga) recently trademarked the word “Candy” and are now using their legal & financial power against smaller competing companies:
Candy Crush Saga developer trademarks ‘candy’ (Polygon.com)
Candy Crush owner King.com wins trademark, immediately starts sending takedowns (Geek.com)
It’s ironic that King.com is concerned about intellectual property when they so blatantly copied our game Scamperghost with their game “Pac-Avoid” in late 2009. In fact, using “Pac” from Namco’s Pac-Man is exactly the same thing they’re trying to stop people from doing with their “Candy” trademark!
Compare our games below. Full story after the images:
How It Happened / Proof
We were in talks with Lars Jörnow at King.com to license our Scamperghost game. Before the deal was closed (and certainly before any contracts were signed) MaxGames.com made a better offer so we thanked King for considering our game and politely ended our negotiations.
King.com (giant company) retaliated against us (two young indie devs) by quickly making a direct clone of our game and almost released it before us! We only got ours out sooner because a friend close with the company contacted us privately to warn us in advance…
Some fellow Flash game developers were pretty outraged at the IndieGamer.com forum. King.com eventually emailed us:
from: Lars Jörnow
date: Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 11:43 AM
subject: IndieGamer Forum post
mailed-by: king.com
We wanted to sponsor Scamper Ghost since it’s a great game and since we were actively looking for an avoider game at the time. The flash world is filled of similar-looking games, and there are probably hundreds of avoider-games with similar menus, a box with enemies, and coins – and we thought Scamper Ghost was awesome.
Scamper Ghost is a great game. We’re sorry our deal didn’t turn out with you guys – you made out with more money and we were left without an avoider game that we had already planned on. We needed an avoider game and sponsored a similar game.
– Lars
But it was worse than just “sponsorship of a similar game.” We tracked down the developer that made Pac-Avoid and it turns out they were contacted by King.com to clone the game!
from: Porter [email protected]
date: Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 9:25 PM
subject: Pac Avoid / Scamper Ghost
First off, sorry that we (Andrew and I of EpicShadow) cloned your game for Lars of King.com. I know there’s a ton of rumor as to what happened, so here’s the exact details, you believing them is your decision. Lars approached us one day explaining that you (Stolen Goose) had signed a contract, had been working with him on finishing the deal, and then got a better deal and backed out. As tempting as more cash would be, if contract was signed, douche move. I don’t know if that actually happened, so feel free to clear it up. He asked us to clone the game very quickly, and even wanted to beat the release of the original game.
No “contract” was ever signed, this was Lars/King justifying their actions to a small indie developer that might otherwise have turned down the request to copy our game.
Scamperghost isn’t the most original game in the world. It’s obviously inspired by Pac-Man but we at least took it in an original direction by making it a mouse avoider with no walls.
King.com, however, showed no respect for other people’s intellectual property when they made a direct, blatant clone of Scamperghost. Now they’ve trademarked “Candy” and are using their massive legal power against other small competing developers. A bit of a double-standard, eh?
