This is what lawyers are for. Good luck! 😊

It's annoying but there is no chance you can lawyer the Vector people with your Vectorzone title ;(
I see not much you can do there.
If I pretend to be them I'd be as much annoyed when someone with an unreleased game called Vectorzone starts bashing us. You can't expect them to hunt down all game announcements that have vector in its name.

So, yes annoying, not much you can do, try to shrug it off...

Titles cannot be copyrighted. You have nothing to worry about.

sliderider wrote:

Titles cannot be copyrighted.

I take it you're not very familiar with trademark registration and the requirement of defending it (or you'll lose it)...

It's the very reason why I posted that crocodile up there. His name also contains the word, and Sega could go after those Nekki guys if they wanted...

sliderider wrote:

Titles cannot be copyrighted. You have nothing to worry about.

I refer you to the legal battle between Bethesda and Mojang when Mojang tried to make a game called "Scrolls" and Bethesda sued under the pretext that "Scrolls" was too similar with "The Elder Scrolls" and would cause confusion amongst consumers.

Yes, it was eventually settled, but Mojang and Bethesda both had money and both had the ability to pay for lawyers, win or lose.

I cannot afford to fight a legal battle I may or may not win, I can only fight a battle I'm guaranteed to win based on the evidence I can present. If Nekki Gmbh decides to be mean about the names being similar, I have no ability to fight them on it, and if Steam feels the names are too similar it might hurt my chances of ever being Greenlit through Steam, regardless of anything, even if Nekki Gmbh is like, "Yeah it's cool. No worries if the names are similar like that", even if it were the most popular thing to ever show up in Steam Greenlight.

Speaking of which, I'm still debating whether to bring this to Nekki Gmbh's attention or not. The worst case scenario is they ignore me and immediately file a lawsuit... not very likely in the slightest, but not impossible. Best case scenario is they not only say it's cool but offer to let people know they're two separate games so long as I do too.

But yeah, there's a number of reasons why it's dangerous to have names that are too similar when it comes to commercial products. Even free stuff can get axed or altered because of similar names. Heck, I wonder if anyone recalls Sega renaming their Visual Memory System for the Dreamcast to Visual Memory Unit in North America because of this kind of thing?

So yeah, still considering my options. Spent most of today so far just playing Starbound and Minecraft to try and settle down so I can do my voiceover for the next filler later without being distracted by all this.

leileilol wrote:

It's the very reason why I posted that crocodile up there. His name also contains the word, and Sega could go after those Nekki guys if they wanted...

I didn't even consider that... in a strange way that would kinda be ironic...

I mostly just thought you were posting it as a comparison, but when it comes to trademarks you typically need to be a LOT more precise. This is why Mojang stood a chance against Bethesda in the lawsuit I mentioned above. Also, typically it's hard to win a trademark suit if the two things with identical names are completely unrelated. (A character from a game series is not anything near the same as a game itself.)

Dominus wrote:

If I pretend to be them I'd be as much annoyed when someone with an unreleased game called Vectorzone starts bashing us. You can't expect them to hunt down all game announcements that have vector in its name.

I agree. It's not that they did it on purpose, and if those people are normal guys who do not have a habit of deriving extra income from suing fellow game developers, they certainly should not take any action against your game, especially since it's not that the titles are completely similar.

However, if they Google their company name a bit and find out that you're "very angry" with them whereas they did not do anything wrong in the first place (and presumably don't even know who you are), they might very well get antagonized.

Err, speaking of Sega, Vectorman 1 and 2 are still being sold (and on Steam)... whatever the implications are both for Nekki and yourself.

But if push comes to shove, just mangle the spelling. Vektörzone? I'd buy that. ;)

Gemini000 wrote:

Also, typically it's hard to win a trademark suit if the two things with identical names are completely unrelated.

Well there is Edge...

leileilol wrote:

sliderider wrote:

Titles cannot be copyrighted.

I take it you're not very familiar with trademark registration and the requirement of defending it (or you'll lose it)...

It's the very reason why I posted that crocodile up there. His name also contains the word, and Sega could go after those Nekki guys if they wanted...

Notice I said "copyright" not trademark. If you have a character called Skippy the Seal, then yeah you could trademark that and sue infringers but if Skippy the Seal was the title of a book, someone else could write a book called Skippy the Seal and you couldn't sue them unless they were using your Skippy the Seal without permission.

Btw, when you look at http://nekki.com/about/ you can see the first mention of vector on the 24th May of 2012. You still beat them by a month but that's close...

MrFlibble wrote:

Dominus wrote:

If I pretend to be them I'd be as much annoyed when someone with an unreleased game called Vectorzone starts bashing us. You can't expect them to hunt down all game announcements that have vector in its name.

I agree. It's not that they did it on purpose, and if those people are normal guys who do not have a habit of deriving extra income from suing fellow game developers, they certainly should not take any action against your game, especially since it's not that the titles are completely similar.

Oh, I'm 100% positive they didn't name their game Vector simply to hate on me or anyone else with "vector" in the name of their game title.

However, I'm 100% positive they intentionally named their game Vector, figuring it was the best name to give their game.

Naming anything after a single real word is a slippery slope and while it may seem cutting edge to do so, for anything commercial, it can lead to no end of confusion for consumers. Plus let's face it, it makes your product really hard to search for online, at least at first. :P

MrFlibble wrote:

However, if they Google their company name a bit and find out that you're "very angry" with them whereas they did not do anything wrong in the first place (and presumably don't even know who you are), they might very well get antagonized.

Oh well. Waking up and seeing a game by that name all of a sudden on Steam HURT. Not quite nearly as bad as when Minecraft first made its presence known to the masses and started raking in the dough, considering I had been sitting on a very similar idea since 2005 and had only just started considering making it in early 2009 months before, but it's an extremely nasty feeling when someone else comes up with something creative that intrudes on your own unfinished creative work, because the odds of this are so slim, and yet it's happened to me no less than five times now. It's like I have all these great ideas but I lack the speed and time necessary to make them all happen, and then someone else coincidentally comes up with a very similar idea and goes and makes it. Story of my life for the past decade. >_<;

And yes I'm aware this happens routinely to other people too and there's nothing special about it happening to me, but that doesn't negate the way it makes me feel, not just for myself but for the many other people who work on creative pursuits and are faced with events like this.

...sorry, I'm just ranting now really. So many things have plagued the creation of Vectorzone that I feel like my game creating efforts have become stagnant as a result. I can work a LOT faster than this when I have a solid design going and nothing getting in the way. PixelShips Retro took a mere two and a half months to code because the whole process went smoothly and was almost completely free of interruptions.

All I can do really is keep plugging away and hope it'll all be worth it in the end... I probably will contact Nekki tomorrow or the day after and ask them directly and politely if this is going to become an issue. So long as they're not gonna go nuts over protecting their game name then all this worry is for nothing and that's why I'm not taking any actions yet and simply seeing what all of you have to say.

You can't imagine how much fury i've had over that "Scrolls" incident, considering Zenimax owns two game titles with the word "Arena" in them...

At least Minecraft is taking pity on me today. I started a new world and found a total of 13 diamonds without even trying to. :)

...and yeah, if it seems contradictory and ironic that one of my favourite games now happens to be one that intruded upon my creative endeavours, well... there's an adage that you should only make the kinds of games you yourself would want to play. I can't help but want to play Minecraft because it so closely adheres to what I had in mind... actually, let me rephrase that. If you took Megazeux, made it 3D and first-person, with worlds made up of cubes that were player-sized (as opposed to half-player-sized like in Minecraft), simplified the programming system so it was icon-based instead of language-based, and swapped the default functionality of Minecraft's left and right mouse buttons, you'd have my idea from 2005 in a nutshell.

When Minecraft was first announced, I flat-out refused to give it any sort of attention because I was really upset that I had put a few months worth of work into my game idea, only to now be completely unable to proceed with it without seeming like I'm just trying to rip off Mojang. Eventually, just before Minecraft hit its beta phase, I finally had gotten over it (for the most part), having moved on to other projects, and decided to watch a Let's Play of it to see how it had turned out, then gave the Classic version a try, then the full game, and really... while I don't think I'll ever completely get over the fact that someone beat me to it, I'm glad such a game exists, because it's the exact kind of game I would want to play.

I can't even begin to describe the dichotomistic feelings I have over the thing... It's actually kinda similar to how Flynn in the movie Tron still plays the games he made, even though they were stolen from him by someone else and released without credit to him.

And yes, I even started designing a 2D variant of my idea sometime following but stopped about a quarter-way through when I realized, "Someone else is bound to beat me to this. There's no point wasting time on it." Sure enough, Terraria came out three months after. :P

Trademark law is really silly and expiration allows these names to exist....

http://store.steampowered.com/app/234330
http://store.steampowered.com/app/107900/

leileilol wrote:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/107900/

Steam happily tells me that this product is unavailable for my region 😜 But I assume it's Dark Reign?

That one is "War Inc. Battlezone"

I've always considered the possibility of accidental namesakes among video games a very natural, albeit not very common, occurrence. Yeah, some stuff like titles and character names may or may not be copyrighted (as it was with the cause of that temporary change from Duke Nukem to Duke Nukum), but the story of Bethesda's lawsuit against a game containing the word scroll is it is new to me, and quite weird to be frank. After all, Age of Empires, Age of Sail, Age of Wonders, Age of Alexander, Age of Adventure, Age of Japan and Age of Fable are all quite similar-sounding yet completely unrelated titles, however not one of them to the best of my knowledge became a reason for a lawsuit.

If two unrelated titles contain common words from a natural language, who decides if this is a case of copyright infringement or not? How can one trademark words from a natural language anyway? This shouldn't be allowed to happen IMO.

One thing I'm considering if I must change the name is to simply hide the word "vector" behind the letter "v". Something like "V-Zone" or some such. In fact, long before I announced the game last year, back when the idea was more of an arcade shooter with a score system and levels you could progress through, the name was "V-Buster", as the goal was to bust down large numbers of walls.

The funny thing about names is that, anyone can make a claim against any other name and potentialy win such a lawsuit, or sometimes the threat of a lawsuit is enough to get people to change something or stop entirely. The trick is that both things need to be competing in some way and obviously, the more similar the names are, the stronger a case the plaintiff can make. If a registered trademark is in place, it makes the case even more clear-cut.

Lawsuits cost money though so unless you feel something that's a similar name has the potential to curtail your profits, it's disadvantageous to go after such people. Nekki Gmbh is, unfortunately for me, not a "small" company and could very well see products with similar names as a threat.

They haven't returned my eMail yet, but time will tell what their take on this is. I'm still mad about the whole situation but I'm not going to let it stop me from making my game! ;)