Studio Fntastic’s The Day Before Copyright Battle Just Hit A Major Roadblock

Late last month, Studio Fntastic’s upcoming zombie survival MMO The Day Before was pulled from Steam and its videos were taken down from YouTube due to a copyright complaint from a Korean developer with a calendar app of the same name. The studio, however, refused to let go of the title and said that it was going to fight the complaint, claiming that the calendar app maker only filed a trademark to steal the title after the game was announced.

That fight has now taken a turn for the worse as the calendar app’s developer reveals that it’s held the trademark in South Korea in 2015 and has been distributing The Day Before calendar app since 2010, which unfortunately checks out on the app’s Google Play Store page.

The Korean developer further told Eurogamer that they filed a trademark upon finding out that a game with the same name was in development to protect their trademark rights. It now holds the copyright to “The Day Before” in South Korea, China, Russia, Vietnam, Japan, the European Union, and the United States which puts Studio Fntastic’s legal team in quite a pickle.

The studio, however, still claims that they only found out about the copyright issue last month, despite the fact that a 13-year old app with over 10 million downloads would have been relatively easy to find with a quick Google search. That being said, Studio Fntastic’s argument that the calendar app “has nothing to do with the games category” has its merits but it’s likely going to be a very hard sell.

While I don’t presume to know about the inner workings of game development, I’m guessing that it’s going to be way easier for the developers to simply change the title and replace conflicting assets instead of wasting time and resources on a copyright battle that they probably aren’t going to win anyway considering the new information that just came to light.