UPDATE: Wargaming won the lawsuit. Blitz Team will have to cease using WG intellectual propriety.
Wargaming.net has filed a lawsuit against Blitz Team, a Belarus mobile company founded by a former management at the World of Tanks developer.
Submitted to the US District Court in Los Angeles, California, the lawsuit seeks cancellation of Blitz Team’s trademark applications.
“Wargaming contends that defendants’ selection of the name Blitz was made deliberately, in bad faith, and for the sole purpose of taking unfair advantage of the reputation and goodwill of Wargaming’s well-known Blitz trademarks,” said the company in a statement.
Blitz Team was founded in April 2018 by a former Wargaming management team. Before that, they led the World of Tanks Blitz product group and were known internally as the “Blitz Team.”
According to Wargaming, the former management team received over $10 million in additional payments, which included a share of WOTB’s net revenue. The terms of their agreement stated that they were not to compete with Wargaming or solicit Wargaming employees for an set period of time after leaving the company,
The former management team left Wargaming in April 2018 after a year-long period of failed contract negotiations and founded Blitz Team, allegedly taking 30 employees with them.
“After the departures, Wargaming learned that the former management team had made plans to leave Wargaming and form a new video game company, before negotiations were completed, by no later than February 2018,” said the company’s legal counsel.
“Wargaming has also uncovered evidence that members of the Former Management Team began soliciting Wargaming’s employees to join the new video game company that became Blitz Team LLC while they were still employed by Wargaming.”
This is not the first time Wargaming has initiated legal proceedings against Blitz Team in December 2019. According to a blog post from Blitz Team, the World of Tanks developer attempted to sue its former employees for around $1,690,000, alleging they had unlawfully uploaded proprietary software — DAVA Framework — to open source software platform GitHub.
DAVA Framework > A multi platform framework.
Somehow i can’t see anyone but indies give a BLEP about that.
Either that or Chinese copycats, but those always find their way^^
The big established studios are way to stubborn to deviate from their tech (often forcing it on the wrong genres)
Doesn’t impact the players in the least.
Not like WG didn’t miss-manage things before that.
Everything stays the same. Lets move on.
oh and just for fun sake:
friend of mine was on current test…. the repair bug after battle is back, if it was ever gone 🙂