Candy Crush Saga is a cute game that revolves around mixing and matching candies. A simple enough concept, it also happens to be one of the most downloaded games on both the Apple and Google app stores, making around $900,000 a day for its developers according to Independent.co.uk. Considering the amount of money it generates for its developers, King.com (the studio behind Candy Crush Saga) filed for a trademark on the word “Candy” last year and have recently been approved.
This created quite an uproar in the game developing community. If I was a developer I would be mad too, considering a majority of free to play games with add-on purchases are aimed at children, the word “candy,” at least intuitively, seems like a popular word to use. Though in King’s defense, they provided a statement to Mashable claiming, “We have trademarked the word ‘CANDY’ in the EU, as our IP is constantly being infringed and we have to enforce our rights and to protect our players from confusion. We don’t enforce against all uses of CANDY – some are legitimate and of course, we would not ask App developers who use the term legitimately to stop doing so.”
The main developer they had an issue with was Candy Casino Slots, who allegedly focused heavily on their trademark to enhance downloads of its own game by search ranking. Fair enough, considering Candy Crush is King’s candy cash cow; I cannot really blame them for wanting to protect their IP. But contesting another trademark application filed by game developer Stoic, for “The Banner Saga” is just plain wrong. In their notice of opposition they claim the use of the word “Saga” is apparently confusing and deceptively similar to the use of “Saga” in their own game. The Banner Saga is a role playing game about Vikings! Freaking Vikings! How would anyone in their right mind confuse a dark turn based strategy game with lining up colorful candy? It’s like saying people might confuse “Lord of the Rings” with “Lord of the Flies”. Although possible, it is highly unlikely. (more…)