William Barr is a director of Billy Goat Entertainment, a satirical animation and app design company based in Northern Ireland.

As developers, we got into game development to be game developers, not businessmen.

I've yet to meet one of my peers whose main motivation was that of a lucrative business opportunity. Not that that money wasn't part of their motivation; after all it's nice to be able to afford the odd slice of toast in the morning; just that we're geeks, and it's not our primary concern.

But if we want to sell our apps, we need to run our business professionally.

Sure, there is a lot of shizzle on the App Store and it's not uncommon for there to be one or two (or about five thousand) games that occasionally share similar themes or settings. In game design, ideas are cheap.

Good names, though... they can be expensive.

The name of the game

As the old saying goes "What’s in a name? A rose by any etc etc".

Well, quite a lot actually.

As I've just pointed out, there's a lot of shizzle on the App Store and nothing will publicise your game more than word of mouth from your users.

But if Billy tells Joey about your amazing game and Joey goes to download it but can't find said game due to either not being able to remember its name, or its name being spelt in some daft manner, or just looking too similar to another game - (although, this of course is a tactic often used by unscrupulous fellows attempting to cash in on other poor individuals’ ignorance, personally I'm still waiting for Modern Doodle Temple Zombie Birds™) - there are more than enough other games to keep him/her amused.

So, the name of your game is actually the most important tool in your marketing arsenal (followed by your icon, then your sexy screenshots). Therefore, given its importance, if you feel you've came up with a clever one, it would make sense to protect it.

A chance meeting with a real business person last year made us take this a little bit more seriously.

Cutting to the chase

To cut a long convoluted story short, his company were asked politely by the legal representatives of another company to change their company name as our acquaintance's company did not own the trademark for this name. The previously mentioned legally represented company did, however.

This was in spite of the fact that our acquaintance's company existed long before legally represented company.

They had no choice but to change their name, rebrand the company and trademark their new brand.

As a result, while they managed to retain most of their customers, they certainly noticed that they were unable to get the message out to all of them. They also had to spend some cash compensating the other company for their lawyer's inconvenience. Scary stuff.

Trademark trolls

Chilled to the core by this story, we decided we'd best head downtown to the local intellectual property office and trademark our company name. While we were in town we figured we'd better register the names of the games we were developing as well. (It would save on another bus fare).

This isn't a same-day affair.

Once all the relevant paperwork is lodged, the time taken to register your 'mark' (as the blokes in wigs would say) is typically five months (but varies depending on the territory in which you register).

It could be longer if there are any challenges made by the owners of other marks, should they think your mark is too similar to theirs. Prior to being registered officially, your mark is 'advertised; for a period of a few months in a Trademarks Journal.

Outfoxed!

While this process was ongoing, we proceeded to develop one of these games, spending money on advertising, promotional material and so forth.

Roughly two weeks before the game was due to launch, we learned one of our peers had released a game using our registered name.

No doubt this individual had put a lot of time, love and cash into developing his game, and being fellow geeks it didn’t give us any pleasure asking our legal representatives to pass a letter onto him asking him politely to change the name of his game.

But we did.

You see, it would have been very costly for us to change our name at such a late stage. And we'd gone to the extra effort of spending the money to register our name, which would have been pointless doing so if we didn't intend to protect it.

So, regrettably, this individual had to change the name of his game.

You'd be surprised how much it costs to get a solicitor to write two letters, but we opted not to pass our legal fees onto him, as is common practice.

Mind you, if you met him down at the pub I doubt he'd say he appreciated our generosity since he's replaced his game's antagonist with a Bully Goat.

Fair play to him, that’s quite clever and amusing.

But as expensive as this process was for us, it would be a drop in the ocean if we found ourselves in the situation that our business acquaintance had found himself in.

Fox among the chickens

So, to summarise, even if you think that you're just an artist expressing yourself through the medium of game design, if you're selling your shizzle on the App Store, you need to conduct yourself professionally.

At the end of the day, even for geeks, this is a business.