By the way, this trademark is useless. Trademarks are meant to protect the customers, not companies. Trademark is essentially worthless if it does not meet either of the two criteria:
1: It does not indicate the origin of the product. In this case, it is not the name of any company.
2: The quality of the products under trademark is too inconsistent. In this case, character development and gameplay mechanics cannot have a consistent and objective quality to them.
Apparently they took down the MLP MMO because they were planning on releasing a similar product. I doubt Hasbro will make an MLP fighting game so this might be fair play
There is a very obvious difference here, which offers a very obvious solution:
MLP Online was the sort of game that required a persistent company presence in order to function (I assume). Someone had to operate the game servers for the persistent online world etc.
But Fighting Is Magic doesn’t require that sort of continual support, as it should be able to function as a peer-to-peer program or via local user instituted client-server connections rather than a central server.
Thus, the clear solution here is for Fighting Is Magic to publicly “shut down operations” (wink wink) - and continue development in secret. No one gets sued or injunct..ed, and once the game is finished, it can be released. And once it’s released, it’ll be impossible to get rid of. Problem solved.
@441TheSecond
mlp online never tried to make money as fas as i know so point B is the more probable, also hasbro had to claim the rights otherwise they ll just lose it…
I highly doubt Fighting is Magic is going to get canned by Hasbro, they’ve kept relatively down-low, their project is nearly finished without any complains from executives so far, and I don’t think a silly freeware fighting game is worth Hasbro the PR loss.
MLP Online was probably shot down because they either A:Tried to draw a profit in some way, B:Tapped into something Hasbro might want to tap later.