The game once known as Alien Wasteland has now been forced to change its name to Action Alien, following a cease and desist letter from inXile Entertainment.
inXile Entertainment are the developers of Wasteland. They claim Alien Wasteland infringes on their ‘Wasteland’ trademark, despite both games being radically different aside from having the name Wasteland in the title. Developer of Action Alien, Devdan, posted this on his game’s Steam page:
“Because both games have almost nothing in common and no case of confusion was ever reported for almost two years since my game was first announced, I have been calmly explaining through long emails why we should have no worries about this. But I finally ended up receiving a cease and desist letter from their lawyer asking to either stop using “wasteland” or to prepare facing legal actions against me.”
This seems like a case of the bigger, richer developer abusing their power. Action Alien isn’t being developed by a huge team, Devdan doesn’t have the resources to pursue a legal battle in fears that his game could be taken down from Steam. Judging by this tweet, Action Alien has been in development for almost two years now. Only now have inXile decided to take legal action about Devdan’s use of the word ‘Wasteland’.
