Edge Games's
open letter to Mobigame is causing quite a stir, as the dispute over the award-winning iPhone game
Edge deepens.
As we reported earlier on, Tim Langdell's company has struck back at the media forest fire that's torn into him lately over the 'EDGE' trademark and the legal wrangling attached to it, but it seems Mobigame has a very different story to tell.
Mobigame's solicitors have immediately answered the events detailed on the
Edge Games website, evidently concerned over the validity of the emails and details revealed. It's calling into question the accusation that Mobigame lied over changing the game's name to
Edgy, and that it approached Apple to have the application removed from the App Store.
At the same time, Mobigame is working with its ISP to gather proof that several of the emails published in the open letter were never sent, including the message retracting the demand for 25 per cent of the game's historic earnings.
It's also issued an official reply to Edge Games's open letter, below:
"This is just another example of what we consider to be Mr. Langdell's improper conduct. His "open letter" is addressed to Mobigame but is clearly intended for the games industry at large and contains a number of false statements, manipulations of the truth and fabricated evidence.
"For example it refers to certain conversations that never took place and emails that were not sent (or at least not received). We are gathering evidence in relation to that and our solicitors have responded to Edge Games Inc. I will therefore not go into any more detail except to comment on one specific aspect that I think illustrates the point very clearly."
Langdell says:
"We also wrote to Mobigame's solicitors Sheridans on August 3, 2009 indicating we had just submitted the abandonment of our application for EDGY, and repeating that their client is free to use that mark to change the name of their game to in the US, UK and Germany.
"TO DATE SHERIDANS HAS NOT REPLIED AND MOBIGAME HAS DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT CHANGING THE NAME OF THEIR GAME TO EDGY OR ANY OTHER NAME SO THAT THEY CAN GET THE GAME ON SALE AGAIN ON iTUNES IN THE US, UK OR GERMANY.
"There could be no greater proof than this that Mobigame lied when they said Edge Games had held them up changing the name of their game to EDGY; Mobigame only said this to make Edge Games look bad -- and to make our CEO personally look bad, too -- and to try to falsely blame us for Mobigame's lost revenues so as to deceive the independent game community into taking pity on Mobigame and siding with Mobigame against Edge Games and Dr Lagndell personally."
In truth, the position in Mobigame's words is this:
"Edge Games Inc. wrote to Sheridans on 3 August 2009 indicating it had just submitted the abandonment of its application for EDGY and stated that he accepted that we were now free to use that mark to change the name of our game to in the US, UK and Germany.
"Neither Sheridans nor us replied but we did make an application to register EDGY as a community trade mark on 4 August 2009 (
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ohim?ohimnum=E8470916). We did not announce that until we obtained confirmation that Edge Games Inc. has withdrawn its USA application.
"No one should be surprised that we did not inform him of this course of action given his company's history in these matters.
"There could be no greater proof than this that Mobigame HAS NOT lied when they said Edge Games had held them up changing the name of their game to EDGY".
"Now that the road is clear for "EDGY" we can look further into the implications of changing the name. However because of the overwhelming support we have had and the fact that we are increasingly finding that legal position favours our continuing use of the name "EDGE" we have to consider this carefully.
"We are clearly not the first and won't be the last to experience these troubles and we do not propose walking away from them. If we do rebrand it will not be because Edge Games has any validity in its claims but because its conduct has made it impossible for us to trade meaningfully otherwise."
As always, we'd love your opinions, as would Mobigames and - perhaps to a lesser extent - Edge Games.
