Three years after taking Mojang to court over a trademark related to the game "Scrolls" (and losing), Bethesda-parent company ZeniMax is back in the headlines after sending a cease-and-desist letter to Jordan Maron, maker of mobile game Fortress Fallout.
Threatened with legal consequences if the name wasn't changed, Jordan Maron, better known by his YouTube personality Captain Sparklez, took to his channel yesterday to confirm the game's name would be changed. While he disagreed that there could be any confusion between his game, a competitive 2D strategy game, and Bethesda's Fallout series of post-apocalyptic RPGs, he reasoned that ZeniMax's financial clout would be too much to go up against.
"Our lawyers said that Bethesda is a notoriously litigious company," he said. "Obviously they have lots of money and resources at their disposal which we don't really have at the moment. So essentially we are being strong-armed into having to change our name, which is unfortunate because I personally don't see how there is any confusion between Fortress Fallout and the Fallout games."
Maron showed ZeniMax's letter, which requests that its makers "immediately expressly abandon the [trademark] application for Fortress Fallout," and cease using the name in future promotion material.
“It’s pretty silly. Congratulations Bethesda. You won. You beat us. You showed us who’s boss,” he said.
Honestly, this makes me sick to my stomach. It's one thing to protect your brand, but you'd have to be crazy to think that a game which in no way resembles your series except for a single word that's only part of the title would impact the success or failure of either game. This is just another case of ZeniMax bullying smaller developers. It'd be one thing if he was using the word "Fallout" to profit off of ZeniMax's franchise, but that's clearly not the case here.
I'd love to see Maron get some sort of crowdfunding to help fight back against ZeniMax because this sort of thing is despicable. Not to mention it's threatens the health of our industry. Again, it'd be one thing if he was profiting off of ZeniMax's work, but he's clearly not. I'm no lawyer, but I think Maron definitely has a defense here; it just sucks that our court system clearly favors those with more money over those who actually have a defense.
On a more speculative note, is ZeniMax's move indicative that some sort of Fallout announcement is imminent? Perhaps at E3 where Bethesda plans to host its first ever E3 conference? If that were the case, I could at least somewhat understand their reasoning.
