Hasbro Spent Time, Money, Lawyers' Attention To Barely Make A Difference Over My Little Pony Fan Game

from the pony-up dept

Several years ago, we wrote about a fan game that had been shut down by Hasbro because it incorporated My Little Pony intellectual property. Yes, an expression of fandom was bullied out of existence by Hasbro. The argument trotted out by those in support of the company was the same argument that’s always trotted out in these instances: the company had to shut the game down, or else risk losing its trademark protections through non-enforcement of its rights. That’s not actually true, of course. There were many smart business routes to go for Hasbro, including offering a low-cost license to the gamemakers to allow the project to continue. Hell, we’ve actually seen instances in which Hasbro has chosen to enable fans to do some things with MLP characters, such as these 3D printing capabilities. But Hasbro chose to be the bully. And how’d that turn out?

Well, the company essentially might as well have done nothing as far as the end results go. Yes, the fan game is back, albeit with a barely different name, fractionally altered game characters, and with the collective understanding by everyone looking at it that this was supposed to be My Little Pony in a fighting game but now isn’t because trademark. What was Fighting is Magic has become Them’s Fightin’ Herds and it’s every bit as insane as it sounds. Oh, and they actually got someone who has worked on MLP properties to boot.

Them’s Fightin’ Herds is a 2D PC (Windows) fighting game with adorable animals in an original universe designed by Lauren Faust (producer and developer for “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”; creator, director and developer for “Super Best Friends Forever”). It is the spiritual successor to “Fighting is Magic”, with improved gameplay mechanics and graphics, an entirely new (and awesome!) dynamic music system, a graphic lobby, and a whole bunch of new features.

So, let’s review. A group of My Little Pony fans created a fan fighting game using the Hasbro property. Hasbro, rather than spending ten seconds looking for an amicable route that would protect its interests while allowing this expression of fandom to continue, instead decided to sic the lawyers on its own fans. Those fans complied and took the game down…only to slightly rework it to avoid the legal issues and are now releasing the game pending its crowdfunding campaign, which has managed to generate over $100k of its $436k goal in one day, as of the time of this writing. The game is blatantly similar to the original MLP game, save for the changes made to avoid Hasbro’s interference. And it looks like the team has a good chance of cashing out in a major way.

So, the legal route got us all to a barely different place than we would have all been three years ago. How much time and money did Hasbro spend on this? And, whatever that amount was, was it worth it just to get us to what could have been passed off as a possible example of what the many-worlds theory would look like in practice? A barely different adjacent reality that is nearly identical to our own, save for a few ultimately meaningless differences? And, the better question, why didn’t Hasbro learn this lesson the first time, when its legal action against Scrabulous resulted in the exact same outcome?

Filed Under: fan art, fan games, intellectual property, licensing, my little pony, overreaction
Companies: hasbro