King is accused of theft
The legal scandal surrounding King is not fading this week. While the British company was trying to protect its intellectual property, she herself was accused of theft.
One of the central events of this week was the news about King’s desire to get the rights for the words candy and saga. Thus, the company, they say, wants to protect itself from unscrupulous developers who may, using the mentioned words in the names of their games, mislead fans of King products.
Developers from the Stolen Goose studio (namely Junkyard Sam and Nick Bray) find King’s desire to secure his series of projects very funny, because, according to them, King themselves resorted to unfair copying of intellectual property.
The story is as follows:
In 2010, Stolen Goose was looking for a publisher for its Scamperghost game. Including negotiations with King. The latter liked the game very much, but it didn’t come to the contract. Stolen Goose made a more interesting offer MaxGames.com . The studio informed King about this and began quietly finalizing the project.
As it turned out a little later, on the same day that Stolen Goose refused to work with King, the current vice president of King Labs, Lars Jörnow, who held the post of product manager at that time Kings.com , wrote a letter to the now defunct Epic Shadow Entertainment.
In this letter, Lars stated that Stolen Goose terminated the contract signed with King (which, in fact, was never signed) and went to another publisher, so it is necessary to make a clone of Scamperghost as soon as possible and release it before the release of the original game.
Fortunately, Stolen Goose was warned. The team managed to release their project before the release of King.
Stolen Goose backed up her story with two letters confirming the story.
One from Lars, in which the manager states something like this: since you decided not to cooperate with us, we decided to sponsor the development of a similar game.
The second is from one of the developers of Epic Shadow, where it is revealed which version of events Lars brought to the authors of the clone (they say, Stolen Goose threw everyone, we need to take revenge and quickly create a clone).
Given the current history around fixing not even phrases as IP, but simple common words, Stolen Goose accused King of a policy of double standards.
Source: http://junkyardsam.com/kingcopied
About the companies:
King, a company that started in the segment of casual and flash games for PC, thanks to the success of the Saga series projects on Facebook and mobile platforms, has turned into one of the most successful global game studios with a DAU of more than 90 million in a couple of years.
Junkyard Sam is the pseudonym and blog of artist Matthew Cox, one of the authors of Scamperghost
