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Prey for the Gods, an indie game that found life on Kickstarter and is estimated to release later this year,  is now Praey for the Gods. In a newsletter posted a few days ago, the dev No Matter was able to talk about it, stating it hadn’t signed any kind of NDA, and named Bethesda and ZeniMax as having brought trademark law up against the name of the game. It was, apparently, too close to ‘Prey’.
‘We could’ve fought this and we did think about it for quite a while. Something like a trademark opposition can be long and depending on how far someone wants to fight it can be very expensive. We didn’t want to spend our precious Kickstarter funds, nor did we want to have to ask for additional funds to fight this in court. Using backer money towards something that doesn’t go towards the development or backer rewards felt horrible to us. Even if we did win we’d have to spend a solid chunk of our funds and in our opinion it wasn’t worth it.’
Apparently the team had previously considered calling the game Præy for the Gods, but decided consumers might have difficulty finding the game in search engines, for example. It’s now pivoted around a bit and landed on Praey for the Gods.
It sounds like this was a bit of a harrowing experience.
‘It was something that kept me up many nights, and no doubt shifted our focus from our game frequently. Worrying about the outcome if we went to trial, if we’d lose our fans or walk away from the mark and still potentially get sued for millions on trademark infringement. This is really something no starting company should have to deal with let alone a tiny team of 3. So the fact that we came out the other end intact still developing the game was a win. One that will no doubt shape our company moving forward.’
While we at VG are looking forwards to Prey, ‘Thesda has a bit of a history with this sort of thing, most famously with Mojang over the name Scrolls.Â
On the plus side, this might get No Matter some more attention for their game. To that end, here is the trailer for Praey for the Gods. They are still accepting donations and support towards development.
