'I don't understand why they feel like they own the word CANDY' This was the week when remote access app LogMeIn pulled its free version, uniting freeboards in a resounding cry of "Hell no! We don't pay for stuff on the internet!" The app may not have had quite the poor reception to its announcement of going from free to not-free if it hadn't a) been providing its service gratis for TEN …
yeah, the candy crush thing to me is ridiculous. The last two comics on penny-arcade, and another comic on CAD both sum up my thoughts on the candy trademark thing pretty well. Would post links, but I'm at work.
As an over exaggeration, it'd be like nintendo trademarking use of italians in games because they had mario first. Bye bye assassins creed. "But they had an italian in the game, and the second game DIRECTLY REFERENCE MARIO!"
Do they mean the game - because it looks an awful lot like Tetris to me or the pay to advance levels - which i am sure existed well before they did.
So basically they have built their business of other peoples ideas. A lot like Samsu^H^H^H^H^H^H several other companies i could mention.
Looks just like a jazzed up Bejewelled to me. Even that wasn't particularly original - I had various 'match three things with extra bonuses if you can match more' type games way back when my main PC had a 286 processor!
They're only really claiming IP on the name 'Candy' - but they're not the first to use it. According to Wikipedia, Candy Crush Saga was released on 12-April-2012. A bit of googling reveals that Popcap released something called Candy Train for the iPhone in May 2011 with some reviews calling it a 'long forgotten classic' so must have been around some time before that.
"All Candy Casino Slots – Jewels Craze Connect: Big Blast Mania Land"
Well actually that's an app store rejection without anything to do with candy, because the icon and real name isn't that.
It's gaming the app-store keywords and should never have been allowed by apple in the first place :)
That was my thought too. Regardless of the asshattedness of King trademarking CANDY, hsu is obviously a complete chancer looking to cash in on searches for any similar game rather than coming up with a good name himself - even King managed to avoid using the word Jewel when they ripped off bejeweled.
In short both entities involved are tossers. King merely got there first and took it to a higher level of tossery-ness. Hsu is merely penny-ante third rate copy artist - King have the saving vice of being complete megalomaniacs and first rate copy artists.
Their business model relies on giving away as closed-source gratis software a game which posts your achievements on the Internet for all to see, and offering players the chance to cheat by paying real money -- as in actual pound notes -- to buy progression through the game.
That has SCAM written right through it like a stick of Brighton rock. It's a straightforward appeal to vanity combined with a nickel-and-dime job. Motivated by a burning desire to beat your friends' published scores, you spend small amounts of money at a time to cheat your way through an utterly pointless game.
That is exactly the kind of project that non-tossers wouldn't get involved with.
They may be tossers for various reasons, but you don't have to post your achievements on the internet (you can play without connecting it to Facebook if you want to) and apparently you can, if you so wish, get to the end of it without paying a penny.
But, since the days of the arcade games of the late 70's, hasn't the point been to get you to spend money and try to beat your friends on the high-score table doing something that is ultimately pointless? In this aspect, I can't see King as taking a particularly moral low-ground as compared to Taito, Sega, et al.
Yes; but when you played the 1970s arcade video games, you paid exactly the same amount as every other player and got exactly the same chances as every other player. There was no cheating as such -- it was all fair and above board.
The "social media games" model would be more like Pac-Man being free to play; but with an option to insert coins during a game in progress and have power pills (that let you eat the ghosts) or fruit (worth more points) appear. That is what I call "pay to cheat".
For sure, you don't have to have Candy Crush Saga publish your achievements on Facebook; and I can believe the game is winnable without paying to cheat. But it's all designed to convince you to share your results and pay for better ones.
A brief look at the EU trademark database shows 345 results for the word candy. The exclusive use of a real word in a trademark is limited to the look or other presentation of the word not the word itself. So the problem is with the app store, which you can't use if you don't agree to their T&Cs. I prefer common law to company T&Cs it's much more liberal and pro-business.
I am among those surprised about LogMeIn suddenly going non-free. The one minor bit of good news:
One place I do IT for has a paid LogMeIn account, which has a few "free" computers on the account (the "free" ones don't allow for checking logs and so on but do allow remote desktop; the plan they have was short 3 computers, the next larger paid plan covered way more computers than they have). After reading about them cancelling free service with essentially no notice, I figured I better log in and check! There's a notice on the account page, if you have a paid account they are NOT cancelling the tacked on free computers, and you can still add and remove them as you wish as well.
Still, I don't think it's that cool to cancel with essentially 0 notice... and furthermore, LogMeIn working so easily for remoting into systems behind NAT gives it such an advantage over their competitors, that I doubt very many people would have found alternatives to LogMeIn even given a month's notice anyway.
It's the new business model: "Extortionware".
I'm waiting for the day that LogMeIn sends someone to my door to beat the extortionware fee out of me--they might as well, since I've never used the product, and now never will. And I suspect they just lost millions of users thanks to this, and they don't deserve them back, EVER.
I hope they drown in their own excrement.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
