Weekly Links #6

All right, no apologies here, I simply forgot to take care of the newsletter yesterday with everything else I had on my mind. Most of the news this time aren't even strictly about gaming, and there aren't many of them in the first place, so...

Anyway, the two big scandals from last week are continuing. First, we have Peter Molyneux, who made the original Dungeon Keeper, chime in about the recent EA debacle, and his words aren't too kind. Then we have one more opinion about the drama surrounding Flappy Bird, which like the one I quoted on Friday isn't so much about what happened as how insensitive people can be on the Internet. And that's a real problem we're nowhere near solving.

While still on the topic of gaming drama, ever heard of Candy Crush? No? It's yet another of those games that are supposedly free to play but in fact cost a ridiculous amount of money to be at all fun. But that's not the problem. Since last month, its developer has been on a trademark trolling binge, trying to get exclusivity on the word "candy" in game titles. (And if that sounds ridiculous, consider a certain software mammoth who has long trademarked common English words such as, well, "Word"). That enraged the gamedev community to the point of launching a suitably-themed game jam, which is only possible because the trademark hasn't been granted yet.

Anyway, the big revelation about this entire story -- and notice how I didn't bother to cover it until now -- is that Candy Crush was in fact stolen from a much smaller developer, who has now lost the rights to his own game, and with that a good portion of his livelihood. So don't believe Polygon when they tell you the trademark could always be challenged in court. Trust me, you don't have enough money, or time, or lawyers; and if you think the law protects you anyway, well, have some candy.

To end on a funnier note, PC Gamer lets us know about a new feature of Steam which allows anyone to tag games for everyone to see. Which naturally led to some very nasty words being used. Odd how nothing like that happens on, say, Flickr. Oh wait, on Flickr you can only tag your own photos. But it also doesn't happen on Shelfari, where you can tag any book. Perhaps it's because other people can't actually see your tags. So you see, this doesn't mean allowing tags is a bad idea; it simply means the feature was poorly thought out.

Anyway, that's all I have today. Until next week.