This is a weird one. Prey For The Gods, a Shadow of the Colossus spiritual successor of sorts developed by three people, has had to change its name. No Matter, who were told that Prey For The Gods was too similar to Bethesda’s Prey and the trademark issues that brings, have now changed the name of the game to the slightly less marketable Præy for the Gods.
Zenimax, Bethesda’s parent company, corresponded with No Matter over the, erm, matter and advised them to change the name before it went any further. Even though No Matter had trademarks in place for Prey For The Gods and Præy for the Gods, a single word had Zenimax concerned.
They let fans know of the situation in a recent newsletter:
“We could’ve fought this and we did think about it for quite a while. Something like a trademark opposition can be long and depending on how far someone wants to fight it can be very expensive. We didn’t want to spend our precious Kickstarter funds, nor did we want to have to ask for additional funds to fight this in court. Using backer money towards something that doesn’t go towards the development or backer rewards felt horrible to us. Even if we did win we’d have to spend a solid chunk of our funds and in our opinion it wasn’t worth it.”
It’s stretching on Zenimax’s part to say that No Matter were infringing, but this isn’t the first time they have “punched down” on smaller developers. Back before Minecraft was a phenomenon, Mojang were developing a game by the name of Scrolls, which Zenimax didn’t like because of their Elder Scrolls franchise. The case was settled with Mojang being able to use the name, but not the trademark.
Prey is out on May 5th for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. If you want to find some great indie games that didn’t get bullied into a name change, come over this way.
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