No Man’s Sky developer, Hello Games, has revealed that it was embroiled in a three-year legal battle with British telecommunications company, Sky, over the game’s title. Creator Sean Murray didn’t go into details of the dispute but he did reveal that it was “pretty serious” because Sky is the comapny that forced a giant like Microsoft to change “SkyDrive” to “OneDrive” a few years ago. He wrote on Twitter:
Yay! We finally settled with Sky (they own the word “Sky”). We can call our game No Man’s Sky. 3 years of secret stupid legal nonsense over.
This is the same folks who made Microsoft change Skydrive to Onedrive… so it was pretty serious.
On the plus side, I now know more about trademark law than any sane man would ever want to.
Back in 2013, a UK court ruled that Microsoft’s SkyDrive infringes Sky UK Ltd’s trademark and forced the company to change the name to OneDrive. It’s unclear how Hello Games managed to retain the game’s title but we’ll update our readers if the developer spills more beans.
[Source: Sean Murray (Twitter)]
