Playdead, the Danish studio behind Limbo and Inside, is demanding compensation from former CEO and co-founder Dino Patti over alleged “infringement and unauthorized use of Playdead’s emblems and copyrighted works in a industrial and advertising and marketing context.”
In an e-mail to Game Developer, Playdead confirmed it has “submitted calls for” to Patti, claiming it has “discovered it essential to take this motion to guard our emblems and copyrights, that are important to Playdead’s enterprise and status”.
The authorized demand was initially dropped at public consideration by Patti himself, who claimed he’d acquired a “authorized love letter” from his former enterprise companion Arnt Jensen a number of days in the past. Posting on LinkedIn, Patti said that “my outdated companion has threatened me with an IP lawsuit as a result of I used a publicly accessible image, in a LinkedIn submit 3 months in the past, of the sport Limbo that we created at Playdead collectively.”
Patti additionally posted screenshots of the purported letter, which references this earlier LinkedIn submit instantly. “In the submit you included a copyright protected picture owned by Arnt Jensen, founding father of Playdead, in addition to a registered and well-known trademark ‘Limbo’ belonging to Playdead.” For this “infringement and unauthorized use”, Playdead calls for “appropriate compensation and reimbursement totalling 500,000 DKK” (roughly £56,000).
The letter additionally makes some daring claims relating to Patti’s position within the creation of Limbo, which was the topic of Patti’s preliminary LinkedIn submit that seemingly prompted the letter. “By offering recipients with core insights to the method of creating Limbo, you’re falsely giving the impression that you just performed a major position, together with a inventive position, within the developer of the sport.”
Going additional, the letter claims that “by stating that we designed, we crafted, we allowed gamers…. This offers a false and deceptive impression to enterprise companions and to the sport business as you had been really not a vital a part of the inventive growth of LIMBO.”
According to Patti, such calls for from Playdead are nothing new. He states in his LinkedIn submit that “it is occurred repeatedly during the last 9 years”. He additionally claims that on one of many earlier events Jensen “tried to bully” him, he instructed his former enterprise companion he would “make it public.”
In response to the letter, Patti states he was “a major a part of constructing Playdead from the bottom up” and that “with out me, Playdead would not have existed. That’s not ego, that is a truth.” While he would not instantly problem Jensen’s claims relating to Patti’s position in Limbo, he does say that “we created” the sport “at Playdead collectively.”
Patti departed Playdead following the launch of 2016’s Inside, happening to assist discovered Jumpship Games with Chris Olsen, which went on to developer 2022’s Somerville. The letter posted on LinkedIn by Patti references this recreation too, stating Playdead needs to “emphasise and reiterate beforehand said issues about Somerville, and the significance that Playdead’s mental property rights stay revered always.” The letter would not specify what these issues are, nevertheless.
Playdead, in the meantime, hasn’t launched a recreation because the launch of Inside. According to the studio’s X profile, its present undertaking is a “Third-person science fiction journey set in a distant nook of the universe”. Our final glimpse of this anonymous recreation got here in February final 12 months, when Playdead revealed two new items of idea artwork from the undertaking.
