Hey, I just wanted to thank you for your overwhelming support here for my last post: I’m a dev who has been working on my game for 2 years and my game title got stolen on Steam and they plan to release before I do. What should I do?
Quick summary of the situation: I’ve been working on my game called The Milgram Experiment for a while now and last week I found out a game with the exact same title was recently added to Steam. I wasn’t sure what to do and never considered such a scenario because I always thought that Valve would just prevent you from using a name of a game that already exists. I got a lot of comments with people recommending me to contact Steam, to trademark the name worldwide or to even to try and contact the other dev.
Resolution: The other game has now officially changed its name to The Obedience Experiment.
How: The other dev actually saw my posts across social media and reached out to me and explained that it was a coincidence and he is very open to changing the name (since my game had the title for 2 years). Our talk was genuine and I felt there was no malice on his part. So it’s all good now!
Feel free to wishlist both games if you like what you see:
The Milgram Experiment on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2719670/The_Milgram_Experiment
The Obedience Experiment on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4777470/The_Obedience_Experiment/
Thanks for helping out a little indie dev and please tell me what do you think of both games? Which title is more catchy? Any feedback is more than welcome :)
Funnily enough, Steam doesn’t have a rule about exact same names, here is their response:
"Hey there,
Valve respects the intellectual property rights of others, and we ask that everyone using our internet sites and services do the same. Anyone who believes that their work has been reproduced in one of our internet sites or services in a way that constitutes copyright infringement may notify Valve’s copyright agent using the form below.
That said, you may want to talk to the other developer directly to work out a solution. We don’t have any rules against games sharing the same name, so there wouldn’t be any problems for us if you and the other developer decided to name your product similarly."
That sounds reasonable to me. Just think what would happen otherwise, if anyone could just spam out slop to take potential names hostages.
But good for you that you got it resolved! 🙂