Mercs Miniatures Receives Cease and Desist for Myth

I am increasingly amazed at the kind of minefield the (miniature)-games industry is. Here’s some unpleasant news from Mercs Miniatures, who recently completed a nearly 1,000,000.- USD Kickstarter for their cooperation fantasy miniatures board-game Myth.

Their game Myth, or more specifically the logo for their game Myth received a Cease & Desist letter from Electronic Arts. What’s the violation you ask? Well, it appears that Electronic Arts has secured the rights of using letters in combination with flamers! I am not kidding! Seriously!

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#1 – The Old Myth Logo

Here is the offending logo, the old Myth logo with a little flame over the “Y”.

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#2 – Cease & Desist

Here’s the announcement from the Myth Kickstarter.

Unpleasant news first:

On the 21st we received a cease and desist letter from EA asking us to not use the Myth logo. We were rather taken back by what it could mean, and went to our lawyer the next Monday. It appears they have legal rights to the use of flames on letters, numbers, and symbols. He strongly advised removing the flame. He said it had to do with the close proximity of in the court’s eyes to video games and board game. Specifically, most courts will see them both as “games”.

The solution was easy for us: remove the flame from the logo. It is shown below. Here is the important part. We need anyone who posted or used this logo anywhere to replace it with the new one. We’ll take care of here and the BGG.

Furthermore, it is delaying the printing of certain elements a few weeks because we need to make sure this issue is resolved. As we posted previously, we were working towards delivering early (you’ll see proof of the progress later in the update) so this delay won’t affect the timeliness of the January delivery date. It is still too early to tell if it will push us out of the November base game goal.

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#3 – The New Myth Logo

And the new Myth Logo:

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#4 – Seriously?

Lucky for the guys from Mercs Miniatures to get out of this one without much of a fuss.

But Electronic Arts (thinks it) owns the “legal rights to the use of flames on letters, numbers, and symbols” in anything broadly related to gaming? In general? Really?

Holy!!!!

Z.