The chief executive of casual games firm King, the publisher of Candy Crush Saga, has published an open letter responding to attacks on the company’s recent moves to trademark the word ‘Candy’.

King has been fiercely criticised by other games developers for both the filing and for opposing indie studio Stoic’s attempts to trademark the name of its Viking strategy game The Banner Saga.

The controversy has extended to an older web game called Pac-Avoid, published by King, which was accused of being a clone of an existing game called ScamperGhost which had been pitched to King before being published elsewhere.

In a letter aiming to “set the record straight”, chief executive Riccardo Zacconi apologised for Pac-Avoid, but defended his company’s decision to file for trademarks based on its more recent games, while opposing Stoic’s filing.

“The game strongly resembles another game called ScamperGhost. The details of the situation are complex, but the bottom line is that we should never have published Pac-Avoid,” wrote Zacconi.

“We have taken the game down from our site, and we apologise for having published it in the first place. Let me be clear: This unfortunate situation is an exception to the rule. King does not clone games, and we do not want anyone cloning our games.”

On the trademark filings, Zacconi explained that King acquired the EU trademark for ‘Candy’ last year from a bankrupt company, and has now filed for a similar trademark in the US.

“We’ve been the subject of no little scorn for our actions on this front, but the truth is that there is nothing very unusual about trademarking a common word for specific uses. Think of ‘Time’, ‘Money’, ‘Fortune’, ‘Apple’, and ‘Sun’, to name a few,” he wrote.

“We are not trying to control the world’s use of the word ‘Candy’; having a trade mark doesn’t allow us to do that anyway. We’re just trying to prevent others from creating games that unfairly capitalise on our success.”

On The Banner Saga, Zacconi admitted that Stoic’s game does not resemble any of King’s titles – in other words, it’s not trying to unfairly capitalise on their success – but argued that the move was necessary in order to protect King’s use of the word ‘Saga’ for its casual games.

“We’re not trying to stop Stoic from using the word Saga but we had to oppose their application to preserve our own ability to protect our own games.  Otherwise, it would be much easier for future copycats to argue that use of the word ‘Saga’ when related to games, was fair play,” he wrote.

It seems that even within King, there are people who disagree with some of the steps taken by the company in recent weeks. “There has been a vigorous debate both inside and outside King about how we protect our intellectual property,” as the CEO put it. “At its simplest, our policy is to protect our IP and to also respect the IP of others.”

With King seemingly intent on continuing its opposition to Stoic’s trademark filing, Zacconi’s letter is unlikely to dampen down the criticism of his company – which plays into a wider, often-heated industry debate about the dominance in the mobile games world of free-to-play games like Candy Crush Saga.

That game alone is estimated to be generating revenues of $3.5m a day across smartphones, tablets and Facebook from in-game purchases of virtual items, but that has made it a target for increasingly-vociferous critics of this business model.

King’s most recent financial results showed the company – under its original trading name of Midasplayer.com – reporting turnover of €26.6m (£22.1m) and a net profit of €5.3m for its 2012 financial year, although with Candy Crush Saga only launching for Apple’s iOS in November that year, its financial impact on the company won’t be known until its 2013 results are published.

And the millions of people playing Candy Crush Saga every day? They’ll remain blissfully unaware of the trademark filings, cloning accusations and industry rows about free-to-play gaming. The rows about King and its games are unlikely to put off many of the actual players, for now.

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