King, purveyors of the saccharine free-to-play money-generating pit that is Candy Crush Saga had a busy time in the headlines last week thanks to its legal shenanigans. The company has attempted to trademark the word Candy and has also tried to assert its ownership of the word Saga, which has put them at odds with indie developer Stoic, the studio behind Viking legend-themed RPG, The Banner Saga.

Back in 2011, I wrote something about a lawsuit between Bethesda Softworks and Mojang with the former claiming that the latter’s upcoming game “Scrolls” would confuse players into thinking it was somehow associated with its “The Elder Scrolls” series (more commonly known amongst gamers as Skyrim, Oblivion, and maybe the odd older title such as the far superior Morrowind). The King vs Stoic incident is similar, even down to the size of the companies involved.

Time to be lazy. The best summary of this that I’ve read is probably here at Rock Paper Shotgun. The summary is absolutely spot on in painting this as a David vs. Goliath situation where Goliath can rely on the £2m in daily revenue he generates from microtransactions to wait out on David’s lawyers running out of funding.

A very valid question at this point is why am I bothering to write something after it has faded from the news spotlight? This story is about a week old now, making it absolutely worthless in terms of news-value, so why post about it now? Well, I have this theory that we all forget about things as soon as they are old news and I think this one is an issue that should stick around for a little longer. This issue does not go away for Stoic and King once it fades from headlines. Instead, this will bubble away in courts and legal documents for months until action is taken or a decision is made.

King is not without its defenders in this case. It has rolled out a half hearted PR machine that has managed to employ a spectacular piece of double-think that asserts it is not trying to make The Banner Saga change its name and doesn’t think that it’s being deceptive or derivative, despite submitting a legal document that says exactly those things (technically it is an opposition to Stoic’s attempt to register “The Banner Saga” as a trademark, but the result is ultimately the same).

Stoic is understandably unhappy about this turn of events and really you’d expect a Viking-themed RPG to have the right to use the word “saga”, especially when facing off against a brightly coloured match-three Bejewelled clone. Even though King has stamped around saying it doesn’t clone games, it is hard not to see the obvious comparisons and even harder to really take them seriously in that assertion.

Candy Crush Saga is undeniably successful and generates an obscene amount of money through some truly devious monetisation strategies (I fully intend to write something about the pay-bridge at some point). It is going to be set upon by a lot of rather shady types trying to trick potential customers into downloading something that looks or sounds similar, but honestly none of King’s portfolio of games can be described as terribly innovative or original. Candy Crush Saga is so similar to any other match-three Bejewelled-like game and many of its other games are incredibly similar to Candy Crush Saga in turn. Clones within clones.

Stooping to this level of trademark trolling is definitely the sign of a business playing it safe. It sadly doesn’t surprise me to see this action coming from King, especially as it is hot on the heels of news that its IPO has been abandoned for fear they have produced a one-hit wonder and signs that they are generally trying to drum up investor interest. Trademark trolling and protecting as many interests as possible therefore makes sense as investors are some of the most skittish and easily startled people on this planet. This still does not make this action terribly palatable though.

Ideally, a court will pull out a definition of the word saga and declare that “A prose narrative usually written in Iceland between 1120 and 1400, dealing with the families that first settled Iceland and their descendants, with the histories of the kings of Norway, and with the myths and legends of early Germanic gods and heroes” probably applies more to a Viking RPG than a sweet matching game. Ideally a court will point out that other games have used the word “saga” before. Ideally this gets thrown out as nonsense. Ideally ideally King decides that this was a silly idea in the first place, withdraws from legal action and fires the hapless intern that they want to heap the blame on in order to save face.

The only thing we can really do is make a bit of noise about it and maybe send a little support to Stoic. Here is a link giving you options on how to buy The Banner Saga. I’m fairly confident it is a good game – it’s one of those games that is on my impossibly large list-of-things-to-look-into so I can’t say for sure, but it does look beautiful, it has had good reviews (like this one at Eurogamer) and a lot of love has clearly gone into the game so there are far worse ways you could spend your money.

Inversely, it’s tempting to encourage a boycott on Candy Crush Saga, but then I’d be questioning if that feeling is connected to this issue at all or just me being grumpy about what I consider a truly poisonous and destructive game for the marketplace in general. As they say, that’s a story for another day.