With an unexpected move, the furniture giant IKEA sent an independent developer a letter of formal notice asking him to make changes to his survival horror game unpublished set in a furniture store, The Store is Closed.
IKEA against the horror video game The Store Is Closed
Lawyers representing IKEA claim the game is infringing the trademark because some press outlets did comparisons between their official brand and the game. The Swedish company gave it to the developer Jacob Shaw only ten days to “change the game”.
The Store Is Closed it’s a cooperative survival game unpublished, now in the last week of a campaign Kickstarter of success that has garnered little more than $ 49,000. Created by a lone developer, who calls himself Ziggythe game describes itself as “set in an endless furniture shop”.
“You will have to manufacture weapons and build fortifications to survive the night,” continues the paragraph. “Explore the underground SCP labs and build towers to the sky to find a way out.” Like in a real IKEA store? The fact is that in no game promotional materialare Steamor during the Kickstarter campaign, the word “IKEA” was never spoken.
Despite this, and despite the game is not currently for sale nowhere, IKEA lawyers in New York, wrote to the developer asking him to completely change anything in the game that can remember their brand.
“Our client has learned that she is developing a video game that uses, without our client’s permission, the elements associated with the famous IKEA stores.”
The letter then continues listing aspects of the game of Shaw which constitute a violation.
Your game uses a blue and yellow sign with a Scandinavian name on the shop, a blue box-like building, yellow shirts with vertical stripes identical to those worn by IKEA staff, a gray path on the floor, furniture that looks like IKEA and product signage that looks like IKEA. All of this immediately suggests that the game is taking place in an IKEA store.
The problem however arose due to the printing that unnecessarily associated the title with IKEA stores. Speaking of The Store is Closed, some wrote “someone created a survival horror game set in IKEA”. Others, however, write “The Backrooms meets Sons of the Forest in IKEA’s new horror game”.
These are just a few of the titles found on the internet and there are likely to be many more.
The lawyers letter also includes the subtitles of these stories as part of the evidence. In fact, he says: “In addition, numerous comments from readers of these stories make an association with IKEA stores.”
“The video game must change”, the words of IKEA
Simply put, Shaw was told that his “unauthorized use of IKEA clues constitutes unfair competition and false advertising under Section 43 (a) of the United States Trademark Law, 15 US C § 1125 (a), and state laws on unfair competition and false advertising “.
The lawyers of IKEA they then concluded in this way:
Of course, you can easily make a video game set in a furniture store that doesn’t look like an IKEA store. He can easily make changes to his game to avoid these problems, especially since he doesn’t plan to release the game before 2024.
Finally they point out again that Shaw has “ten working days from the date of this letter” for make all these changesremoving all their alleged “clues”.
“I would have spent the last week of my Kickstarter preparing an update for all the new alpha testers,” Shaw told Kotaku. “But now I have to desperately renew the whole aspect of the game to avoid being sued.”