FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard

mandreiana writes "As of June 20th, FreeCraft is shut down. The development team received a cease and desist order due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft, and also some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2. There will be no more updates to this game, and it is no longer available for download." Way to go, Blizzard, now the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share. Of course, not using a *Craft for a game project might have kept it under the radar a while longer.

Comments

Please

[dh003i]

Let's not pretend that the people playing FreeCraft think it was produced by Blizzard.

Trademark laws are there for the CONSUMERS, not Blizzard.

Obviously, the consumers want FreeCraft to be named FreeCraft, so blizzard can fuck off and go to hell.

Re:Why not just change it?

[_xeno_]

(I'm guessing there's things like similar artwork here, since gameplay mechanics cannot be copyrighted).

Last time I checked out FreeCraft, not only was there "similar" graphics, there were icons and images ripped straight out of StarCraft. Like various tiles from the grassland StarCraft mapset, likewise with tree "doo-dads" from StarCraft. I think they also flat-out stole a Terran Marine as a unit.

Creating your own free RTS game is a worthy goal. FreeCraft is attempting to recreate StarCraft or something. FreeCraft was asking for this to happen. My first thought was "it's about time" - I would have expected this to happen a long time ago.

Maybe some of the FreeCraft code can be resurrected into a truly new game, but not only was the current game not that interesting, it was also a fairly blatant ripoff of StarCraft.