The developers of Candy Crush Saga have been in the news a lot over the last few days and not for any particular good reason. King made headlines over the recent trademarking of the word ‘Candy’ and then made even more headlines by trying to go after the developers of The Banner Saga because they used the word ‘Saga’, another word that King has trademarked.
Update January 24th, 2014 1:53pm PST: In an ironic twist the Candy Crush Saga developer King, who is now denying that they cloned a title called Scamperghost with a game called Pac-Avoid, has pulled Pac-Avoid from their site and search results. Of course you can still find it if you know where to look. Update from The Escapist
This was all just in the last few days and now King has once again made headlines and for another not-so-good reason. Another developer, named Matt Cox, has announced publicly that King copied another game called Scamperghost which is a title this other developer made. Originally this game was going to appear on King.com but then this other developer got a better offer elsewhere.
This developer thanked King and moved on. King, however, apparently saw the value in this other game and paid some other developer to copy it and release it on King.com before Cox went ahead and released it on the other site that made him the better offer. This clone is called Pac-Avoid which is pretty ironic because the word Pac is probably trademarked by Namco Bandai.
Of course King is saying that Pac-Avoid was already in development before Scamperghost was taken to the other site that made the better offer. And so there are more legal issues with King happening and with the internet full of jokes about King trademarking the word “candy”, it looks like King has a long road ahead of them. You can check out the entire email conversation and allegations between Matt Cox and King over on Matt’s website.
Website Referenced: PocketGamer
