Take-Two slammed by game devs after ‘R’ logo results in “absurd” Rockstar lawsuit

Rockstar’s owner Take-Two Interactive has hit another ‘R’ logo company with a trademark lawsuit, and the developers behind it aren’t very happy about the legal battle.

Stewart Chisam, CEO of Hi-Rez Studios (Smite 2 developer) and RallyHere, was the first to call out Take-Two and its trademark lawyers for discovering what he called an “infinite money glitch” and arguing with the studio about RallyHere’s ‘R’ logo.

RallyHere is a cross-platform multiplayer backend as a service provider for game studios. The image in the post below demonstrates how its ‘R’ logo looks.

I’ll give it to them. Some trademark lawyers that represent TakeTwo have found an infinite money glitch to divert $$$’s away from actual game developers and into lawyers’ hands. We and they have spent weeks (duration time) and thousands of dollars senselessly arguing the obvious… pic.twitter.com/ojdSxLxjr9

— Stewart Chisam (@schisam) August 28, 2024

Evidently, Take-Two believes RallyHere’s emblem is too similar to Rockstar’s logo, resulting in a trademark dispute.

Chisam called out Take-Two on X by explaining how he feels they “harass anyone in the games industry that tries to use an R in their logo, no matter how far away from the Rockstar logo, and bank easy money that could have gone to making games instead.”

He continued, “No creature in our star system is ever going to confuse the logo below with Rockstar’s iconic ‘R with Star’ logo.”

Jessica Flowers, general counsel for RallyHere and Hi-Rez Studios, replied to Chisam’s post. “Apparently nobody in gaming can use the letter R except for them, even when [the] likelihood of confusion is zero. It’s been an awesome use of our time and resources,” Flowers said sarcastically.

Responses from Chisam’s original post were just as confused and annoyed by this dispute. “Absurd. The logos do not share ANY resemblance. I’ll be honest I didn’t even know that was an R on the RallyHere logo,” one reply said.

There were even some commenters who were grateful for Chisam speaking up about this issue: “I love these kinds of tweets. Gives a [peek] into the side of the games company not very well known or thought about.”

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the only dispute Take-Two has initiated with a company over an ‘R’ logo. Back in January, Grand Theft Auto’s publisher filed a dispute with Remedy, the developer behind Alan Wake and Control.

It didn’t stop at just ‘R’ logos, as Take-Two also filed a lawsuit against It Takes Two developer Hazelight Studios in 2021 for the game name’s similarity to the company name.