Prey for the Gods forced to change its name because of Bethesda and Zenimax

Being an indie can be tough. So when a major AAA developer and/or publisher comes around feeling like there is a conflict between their product and yours, typically it only ends one way. That's what indie developer No Matter Studios has recently discovered with Bethesda and Zenimax. Because of the company's soon to be released Prey reboot, which has apparently trademarked the word "Prey," No Matter Studios has been forced to rename their upcoming Colossus-inspired adventure game, Prey for the Gods into Praey for the Gods.

No Matter Studios detailed the matter in their latest newsletter on their site a few days ago. Here's an excerpt.

Oh yea that…so we didn’t want to do this but we had to change our game name from Prey for the Gods to Praey for the Gods. Thankfully we get to keep the logo but we will spell it “Praey for the Gods”. Honestly, we could make this entire newsletter about our thoughts on this. Trademark law is what we were dealing with and we aren’t under any NDA so we can state the opposition in this situation, Bethesda/Zenimax.

We could’ve fought this and we did think about it for quite a while. Something like a trademark opposition can be long and depending on how far someone wants to fight it can be very expensive. We didn’t want to spend our precious Kickstarter funds, nor did we want to have to ask for additional funds to fight this in court. Using backer money towards something that doesn’t go towards the development or backer rewards felt horrible to us. Even if we did win we’d have to spend a solid chunk of our funds and in our opinion it wasn’t worth it.

The developers say that they are pushing to get the game ready for the Kickstarter Closed Alpha, and according to its Steam page, is still scheduled to release in December 2017.​

Source: [Praey for the Gods via Reddit]