Funko is a notorious brand as far as toys and collectibles come and go. More than the fads Cabbage Patch Kids, Furbys, Talking Barneys, and Ticke Me Elmos, Funko’s Pops toy lines of vinyl figures have emerged to become an enduring presence in toy stores.
This enduring popularity can be perplexing for people who may be into the properties that Funko Pop licenses, but aren’t quite Funko Pop fans themselves. But while older US toy companies like Hasbro and Mattel are struggling to keep business, Funko seemingly continues to go on strong.
But it seems that that success has led the company to be quite careless. A few hours ago, PC gaming storefront itchio revealed on Twitter that the toy company Funko, of all things, got their site deactivated. So if you are one of many itchio account owners, who bought games and other products there, or one of the game developers and content creators themselves, you cannot access any of that right now.
It seems itchio founder Leaf Corcoran went up on ycombinator using his account, leafo. He explained the full details on the situation as so:
“I’m the one running itch.io, so here’s some more context for you:
From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game.
The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all “unauthorized” use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was “fraud and phishing” going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they’re the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care: https://www.brandshield.com/
About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded.
This evening, I got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the domain status had been set to “serverHold” on iwantmyname’s domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I’m assuming no one on their end “closed” the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days.
I’ve been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to “escalate” the issue myself on social media.”
While itchio is nowhere near able to compete with Steam, and likely isn’t even game competition for GOGcom, it’s become a valuable storefront, not just for small game developers, but creators of all kinds. On the side, Leaf launched itchio in 2013, only a few years removed from when Funko started selling their notorious Pop figures.
This is a clear case of neglect on the side of three companies, from iwantmyname, BrandShield, and Funko. But this is more than an embarrassing debacle for Funko – some low-income creatives do genuinely depend on itchio for their livelihood. It’s incredibly selfish for Funko to take that livelihood away from them, for what amounts to red tape for a bogus legal challenge.
In any case, we would tell you to boycott the Funko video game, Funko Fusion, if not for the fact that no one actually bought Funko Fusion. But perhaps boycotts weren’t going to work for this inexplicably popular toyline anyway. We do encourage that you respectfully bring this issue to Funko’s attention, because what should really matter is that itchio go back online for all their creators and users.
