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 trademarks and copyrighted works in a commercial and marketing context."
In an email to Game Developer, Playdead confirmed it has "submitted demands" to Patti, claiming it has "found it necessary to take this action to protect our trademarks and copyrights, which are essential to Playdead's business and reputation".
The legal demand was originally brought to public attention by Patti himself, who claimed he'd received a "legal love letter" from his former business partner Arnt Jensen several days ago. Posting on LinkedIn, Patti stated that "my old partner has threatened me with an IP lawsuit because I used a publicly available picture, in a LinkedIn post 3 months ago, of the game Limbo that we created at Playdead together."
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Patti also posted screenshots of the purported letter, which references this earlier LinkedIn post directly. "In the post you included a copyright protected image owned by Arnt Jensen, founder of Playdead, as well as a registered and well-known trademark 'Limbo' belonging to Playdead." For this "infringement and unauthorized use", Playdead demands "suitable compensation and reimbursement totalling 500,000 DKK" (approximately £56,000).
The letter also makes some bold claims regarding Patti's role in the creation of Limbo, which was the subject of Patti's initial LinkedIn post that seemingly prompted the letter. "By providing recipients with core insights to the process of developing Limbo, you are falsely giving the impression that you played a significant role, including a creative role, in the developer of the game."
Going further, the letter claims that "by stating that we designed, we crafted, we allowed players…. This gives a false and misleading impression to business partners and to the game industry as you were actually not an essential part of the creative development of LIMBO."
According to Patti, such demands from Playdead are nothing new. He states in his LinkedIn post that "it's happened repeatedly over the last nine years". He also claims that on one of the previous occasions Jensen "tried to bully" him, he told his former business partner he would "make it public."
In response to the letter, Patti states he was "a significant part of building Playdead from the ground up" and that "without me, Playdead wouldn't have existed. That's not ego, that's a fact." While he doesn't directly challenge Jensen's claims regarding Patti's role in Limbo, he does say that "we created" the game "at Playdead together."
Patti departed Playdead following the launch of 2016's Inside, going on to help found Jumpship Games with Chris Olsen, which went on to developer 2022's Somerville. The letter posted on LinkedIn by Patti references this game too, stating Playdead wants to "emphasise and reiterate previously stated concerns about Somerville, and the importance that Playdead's intellectual property rights remain respected at all times." The letter doesn't specify what these concerns are, however.
Playdead, meanwhile, hasn't released a game since the launch of Inside. According to the studio's X profile, its current project is a "3rd-person science fiction adventure set in a remote corner of the universe". Our last glimpse of this nameless game came in February last year, when Playdead revealed two new pieces of concept art from the project.
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