04-18-2018, 06:58 PM
Glover. Released in 1998, it was a fairly mediocre 3D platformer in an era full of mediocre 3D platformers. I never played it as a kid, but having picked it up recently, it hasn't aged too gracefully either, in my humble opinion.
But, in a surprise twist that surprises no one, there are 90s kids who are drooling over the chance to re-live the glory days of this D-list one-off 3D platformer. The first 90s kids I'll introduce in this story are the people behind Golden Mushroom Studio.
The Germany-based studio have recently started a social media marketing campaign talking about their new Glover sequel:
It gained a modest amount of popularity (check out that dunkey retweet). After all, not-so-good 3D platformers are having a bit of a revival I guess.
But something about this struck me as odd...
Why is this apparent tiny indie company confirming a sequel to this IP for Switch? Can they afford the license? Why are they marketing it with a GIF of the original game?
To find out, I dug deeper...
This statement provides a great summary. Read it yourself, but to summarize:
Quote:The other thing tho which we want to address is the licensing situation about the Glover IP. Some of you may have seen the US company Piko Interactive LLC jumping into the discussion over on Twitter claiming that they actually own the IP, but are welcoming us to discuss about licensing it. We already reached out to them and currently are awaiting their response. We have to apologize for communicating we were (soon) owning the IP. Apparently we haven’t done our homework correctly and thus were assuming that the registered trademark was already expired even though we did our very best in research prior to the announcement.
So, they do not own the rights to Glover. Furthermore, they thought it was as simple as filing a new trademark, apparently:
They seem to have the very basic ducks in a row for starting an indie company, if this mod's judgement is correct. They're a real company, signed on with all the major console companies, and they even own dev kits. But there's seemingly a pretty glaring error in their judgement on just how IP laws work.
So what became of this? Well, they did the right thing and canned the illegal Glover sequel:
... perhaps even hastily:
But, the story contains another twist... Who are these people that claim to actually own the rights to Glover?
Piko Interactive LLC.
They're a small game development and publishing company that re-distributes old games, or in some cases, works to finally bring unfinished games to their initial release.
So, in conclusion, a tiny indie company who properly works under IP law to produce nostalgic games won out against a tiny indie company who improperly works under IP law to produce nostalgic games. I thought this was a pretty wild story and had to share.