After a three-year fight to retain the name of its upcoming sci-fi title No Man’s Sky, Hello Games has formed an agreement with TV broadcaster BSkyB.
Studio head Sean Murray tweeted that the “secret stupid legal nonsense” arose from BskyB’s ownership of the word ‘Sky’, bringing into question Hello’s right to call its space exploration game No Man’s Sky.
The TV company previously forced Microsoft to change the name of its cloud storage service from Skydrive to Onedrive in 2014 due to the trademark – an outcome Murray said made the case “pretty serious”.
However, Sky has now agreed that No Man’s Sky will be allowed to keep its name.
“I now know more about trademark law than any sane man would ever want to,” joked Murray.
“On the plus side, perhaps this is the real reason Skynet never happened.”
No Man’s Sky was recently delayed from release in late June to August, a move that some have attributed to the legal battle.
However, Hello simply ascribed the lapsed launch to its development of “a type of game that hasn’t been attempted before, by a smaller team than anyone would expect, under an intense amount of expectation”.
This is the same folks who made Microsoft change Skydrive to Onedrive… so it was pretty serious
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) June 17, 2016