King, the developer behind the massively popular Candy Crush Saga, isn’t happy about other people riding its success. It’s easy for a mobile game to just call itself “Chocolate Smash Saga” and garner millions of downloads based on its familiarity to one of the most-played games in the world, but few people understood why King decided to go after The Banner Saga yesterday. Sure, it has “Saga” in the title, but there’s nothing about the two games that you should get confused about.
To make things a bit clearer, King has issued a statement to IGN regarding its recent patent frenzy.
"King has not and is not trying to stop Banner Saga from using its name. We do not have any concerns that Banner Saga is trying build on our brand or our content. However, like any prudent company, we need to take all appropriate steps to protect our IP, both now and in the future.
“In this case, that means preserving our ability to enforce our rights in cases where other developers may try to use the Saga mark in a way which infringes our IP rights and causes player confusion. If we had not opposed Banner Saga’s trade mark application, it would be much easier for real copy cats to argue that their use of ‘Saga’ was legitimate.
“This is an important issue for King because we already have a series of games where ‘Saga’ is key to the brand which our players associate with a King game; Candy Crush Saga, Bubble Witch Saga, Pet Rescue Saga, Farm Heroes Saga and so on. All of these titles have already faced substantive trademark and copyright issues with clones.”
It sounds a bit silly to have such a stranglehold over the Saga brand, but that’s unfortunately how these things tend to work.
