Candy Crush dev responds to cloning controversy

Candy Crush developer King.com has responded to the recent wave of criticisms lodged against the company in the past week concerning its trademark request for the word "Candy," its opposition to The Banner Saga, and one indie developer's claim that they stole his game.

In an open letter posted on the King.com website, CEO Riccard Zacconi defended his company's position on the three subjects.

"At its simplest, our policy is to protect our IP and to also respect the IP of others," Zacconi said. "We believe in a thriving game development community, and believe that good game developers--both small and large--have every right to protect the hard work they do and the games they create."

"Like any responsible company, we take appropriate steps to protect our IP, including our look-and-feel and trademarks," he added. "Our goals are simple: to ensure that our employees’ hard work is not simply copied elsewhere, that we avoid player confusion, and that the integrity of our brands remains."

Addressing the issue of cloning, Zacconi said King never should have published the game Pac-Avoid, which indie developer Matthew Cox maintains is a deliberate copy of his own game, Scamperghost.

"The details of the situation are complex, but the bottom line is that we should never have published Pac-Avoid," Zacconi said. "We have taken the game down from our site, and we apologize for having published it in the first place."

"Let me be clear: This unfortunate situation is an exception to the rule. King does not clone games, and we do not want anyone cloning our games," he added.

Zacconi explained that before King launches any games, the company performs a "thorough" search of other games in the marketplace and reviews relevant trademark filings to make sure they are not infringing on others' IP.

"We have launched hundreds of games. Occasionally, we get things wrong. When we do, we take appropriate action," he said.

On the subject of trademarks, specifically for "Candy," Zacconi reiterated what King had said before: the company is only trying to protect its brand and fend off copycats.

"To protect our IP, last year we acquired the trademark in the EU for 'Candy' from a company that was in bankruptcy--and we have filed for a similar trademark in the U.S. We’ve been the subject of no little scorn for our actions on this front, but the truth is that there is nothing very unusual about trademarking a common word for specific uses," Zacconi said. "Think of 'Time', 'Money,' 'Fortune,' 'Apple,' and 'Sun' to name a few. We are not trying to control the world’s use of the word 'Candy;' having a trademark doesn’t allow us to do that anyway. We’re just trying to prevent others from creating games that unfairly capitalize on our success."

With regard to King's notice of opposition against Stoic Studios' The Banner Saga, which claims the title The Banner Saga is "confusingly and deceptively similar" to Candy Crush Saga, Zacconi said again that King is only trying to protect its popular franchise under trademark law.

"Separately, we have opposed the game developer Stoic’s application to trademark 'Banner Saga.' We don't believe that Banner Saga resembles any of our games but we already have a series of games where 'Saga' is key to the brand which our players associate with King, such as Candy Crush Saga, Bubble Witch Saga, Pet Rescue Saga, Farm Heroes Saga and so on," he said. "All of these titles have already faced substantive trademark and copyright issues with clones."

"We’re not trying to stop Stoic from using the word Saga but we had to oppose their application to preserve our own ability to protect our own games," he added. "Otherwise, it would be much easier for future copycats to argue that use of the word 'Saga' when related to games, was fair play."

Finally, Zacconi said King as a company considers discussion and debate surrounding IP issues to be a "positive thing" that the publisher welcomes. He explained that King regularly discusses and reviews its approach to internal IP policies and will continue to do so in the future.