Mornez has created a website highlighting some of the best games from YoYoGames.com. The chosen games are divided between various categories including horror, action, retro, racing and sports.
The Rocket Pack HTML5 game engine which is designed for professional game developers and not yet publicly available has been bought by Disney for a figure in the $10 million to $20 million range, reports TechCrunch.
Microsoft’s appeal against Apple’s “App Store” trademark registration [pdf], filed October last year, cited YoYo Games as one example of a third party service which used the “App Store” name. YoYo Games App Store was the original name for the YoYo Game Store.
Microsoft’s appeal is an important one and has merit. “App Store” is clearly generic and descriptive. Apple should not be able to trademark the term as that limits others from using it to describe their own app stores.
This appeal is of huge interest to Microsoft, RIM (Blackberry), Google and others.
The fact that Steve Jobs himself used “App Store” to describe competing virtual stores demonstrates pretty conclusive that the term is generic and descriptive.
“In addition to Google’s own app marketplace, Amazon, Verizon and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android. There will be at least four app stores on Android which customers must search through to find the app they want and developers will need to work to distribute their apps and get paid.” — Steve Jobs
I’d expect that should [when] Microsoft wins this appeal, YYGs will start using that term to describe their app store again.
You mean, nobody but Microsoft would challenge a trademark on an obviously generic term?
Copyright law sucks people.
No. People who abuse copyright laws suck. Copyright laws themselves, when used as originally intended, so not suck at all.
Hate MS all you want, but they’ve got a point – you can’t make the name “app store” ubiquitous with selling software without losing control of the actual term “app store”.
Apple shouldn’t be able to control the term anyway – it’s like the term grocery store or computer store. Too vague to trademark.
Nobody but Microsoft would do that. ^_^