Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 6/17/2023
- Exalted: Essence
- Dragonix’s Deadly Denizens (5E)
- Essays on Freelance Tabletop RPG Writing & Publishing
- Dune: Power And Pawns: The Emperors Court
- Forbidden Lands: The Book of Beasts
Top News Stories
Renegade Game Studios Issues Cease & Desist To Indie Creator Over The Use Of The Word ‘Renegade’: Small gaming company The Polyhedral Knights is closing in on the end of the Kickstarter campaign for their seventh game, Renegade City. The game is pitched as “a modern day tabletop rpg where you get to play anti-heroes who are criminals. The city is suffering a plague of crazy yet organized cultists who have been slowly destroying the city and taking over various criminal empires. A fun, fast and unique game that uses dominoes instead of a dice mechanic system.” The game’s campaign is supposed to end today.
However, yesterday they received a C&D message from Renegade Game Studios saying that they have to change the name, or else. From the message itself:
“Unfortunately, your use of the term “Renegade” in the title of your new game creates the likelihood that consumers might be confused between our client’s games and your game, or believe that the two are connected or affiliated. The likelihood of confusion is particularly acute because you are using the “Renegade” element on the identical types of products that are sold by Renegade, and you are both selling to the same types of consumers in the same market channels. As such, Renegade must ask that you agree to rename your game to remove the “Renegade” element. As such, Renegade must ask that you agree to rename your game to remove the “Renegade” element.”
They give TPK until the 23rd to respond or else they will issue a trademark complaint to Kickstarter, and say that if TPK complies they will have two months to purge all use of the word renegade from the project.
We first learned of this via a Twitter thread from another creator who wanted to alert the community of the risk of falling into legal trouble with RGS over this sort of thing, and they put us in touch with Renegade City’s creator, Mickey Barfield. Barfield spoke to us on how the message hit:
“It really caught me off guard and frankly upset me. I am blown away at how they can think that my game title “Renegade City” will take away from them in any shape or fashion. Our Kickstarter is about to end in 9 hours [3:08 PM EDT] and we just now get this? I’m still pretty hurt over this. It seems like if they are willing to go after me over something like this, then what is stopping another company like Wizards of the Coast from going after some other company cause the word Wizard is used in a title of a book or game? It’s crazy.”
Despite the ridiculousness over taking legal action with regards to a plain old word in the English language, there’s not much to be done. Barfield doesn’t want a fight, and the fact is that a company like RGS has a legal team and he does not.
“A small company like me that barely covers the cost of production [Renegade City’s goal is $3,000, and has only gotten a few hundred more than that] can’t afford to fight against a large company like this and they know it. So I am left to scramble to find a new name for my game, create a new logo, and change all the things that have this name on there by next Friday. It will all come out of my own pocket cause they feel that I’m a threat to their IP? It’s not right.”
Barfield has yet to respond to the message as of this writing, but intends to comply despite how upsetting it is to both himself and the backers and fans. He maintains hope that things can get smoothed over without any further problems.
Hopefully this is merely a case of an overzealous legal team attempting to justify their existence, rather than defined company policy, but for now the result is the same: a corporation stepping on those who can’t afford to defend themselves.
Update 6/20/23: Further developments!
Discussion of the Week
/rpg Votes On Whether Or Not To Continue Reddit Protest: With Reddit functionally planning to kill third party API access, many subreddits spent the beginning of this week shut down in protest. While some of those subreddits have returned to relative normal, several others such as /dnd and /dndnext continue to be shut down, with others debating what to do next. /rpg is doing so by setting up a poll with four options: no further shutdowns, alternating shutdowns, shutting down until July 1st, and shutting down until August 1st. The poll is using ranked choice voting, open only to people who are already members , and will remain open until the 20th.
With more than 1.5 million nominal users, /rpg is ranked in the top 1% largest largest communities on the site.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 
I have been following the protest on Louis Rossmen’s youtube channel. Reddit deservers what is happening to it. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
LikeLike
So disgusted by RGS going after such a small creator, and in an industry such as this? Shouldn’t we be encouraging more games and gameplay, rather than stepping on the toes of Indie creators? Sad indeed. I won’t be supporting a company like this anymore.
LikeLike