"(Don't) Hail to the King baby!"

Max Von Sydow invited you to play Candy Crush Saga. **sigh** The latest in a string of invitations to play this game on Facespace. Ignore request - *click* I don't play games on Facespace, and if I did I certainly wouldn't play any of King.com's games. In the same way I won't watch films by Roman Polanski[1] a moral line must be drawn somewhere and as a great man once said "The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!".

My beef with King.com is their down right atrocious business practices and their lack of any sort of ethical compass. While I'm not naive of how generally terrible businesses are to people in their pursuit of making money. Most of their supposed good deeds being a attempt to put a veneer of respectability over an entity that only cares about getting your money. I am outright appalled at the business practices and attitude of King.com.

"Why" I hear you cry, "Why are you like this about poor little King.com?” Well here, as my man Joe Friday would say, are "Just the facts, ma'm"

First off let's start off with their most well known game; you know the one you keep asking me to play. Candy Crush.

Candy Swipe is a game where you match up several of the same type of candy together to score points and junk; Candy Crush is a game where you match up several of the same type of candy together to score points and junk. No I didn't just repeat a sentence twice, they're two different games. One of them belongs to King.com and was released in 2012. The other belongs to a solo independent game developer Albert Ransom who created it for his dying mother in wait for it...2010. Two years before King.com release their game.

As I'm sure you yourself have noted the names can cause some confusion. So when King.com put in a trademark request Al opposed it as "Likelihood of confusion". Ongoing legal battles ensued until King.com bought the rights to an even older game so that they could trademark off that name and  'win' the legal battle and put Al out of business for good. 

Then there is the Saga, saga. Stoic Entertainment (A two person indie studio) recently release a game about Vikings that have to go on an epic journey across frozen wastes battling Giants and the like. They called this game The Banner Saga. King.com have decided to trademark the word 'Saga' as apparently all their games end with saga  as in "the such and such saga"; yeah who knew, y'all just thought it was Candy Crush but no,

it's Candy Crush Saga. You will note that they have started stressing this a lot more in their advertisement bumpf recently, unrelated to this?

This has impacted on Stoic Entertainments business and they can't go forward with any further games in the series until the matter is resolved obviously putting financial pressure on such a small company.

Now I'm no hot shot lawyer, but it seems to me that a game about epic journeys of survival to save your clan from Giants is more of a saga then matching pieces of candy. Just saying.

We also have the whole Scamperghost debacle. Mathew Cox (pffft Cox) was in talks with King.com about developing his new game Scamperghost. The talks fell through King.com approached game development studio Epicshadows to "clone[2] the game very quickly" and thusly Pac-Avoid was born. This was met with some outrage as people had grown a little weary of the King.com by now and so they removed it from their stable of games with a lame arse excuse about totally not being a cloned game, and they weren't doing anything wrong but they were taking it down to remove any confusion it might cause us little folk; how nice.

There you go. There are three solid reasons I won't touch a game by King.com and I'd urge you not to either, but it is a free world[3] you can do what you want. Be advised though if you keep spamming me with requests to play it I will unfriend you from Facespace because those request are REALLY annoying.

My one request that you take home from this is that you never go and see a Roman Polanski film, because they really are shit.

[1]He raped a 13 year old girl in 1977. He admitted to the crime, he just didn't do the time as he skipped the country. So that's why I don't watch them. Well that and because I find most of them pretentious bollocks.

[2]Create a copy of basically.

[3]Disclaimer: This is not a free world.