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Day Before dev butts heads with calendar app in trademark dispute

Day Before dev butts heads with calendar app in trademark dispute

The Day Before has become tied up in a trademark dispute with a, er, Korean calendar app.

As reported by Eurogamer, the trademark for 'The Day Before' is actually owned by a Korean calendar app. This follows developer Fntastic having to pull videos of its game from Steam after the aforementioned trademark dispute.

The studio claims that it owned the 'The Day Before' trademark in January 2021 when the game was first announced. The calendar app hadn't been granted the trademark in the US until August 2022.

"We first distributed the app under the name 'The Day Before' in 2010 to provide anniversary count app services used in many countries around the world," said the calendar app developer.

"We hold trademark rights to the app's name 'The Day Before' and have so far recorded over 40m downloads.

"Since the trademark registration in Korea in 2015, we have held the right (registered in the name of 'The Day Before' CEO Lee Sun-jae). Knowing that the game of the same name was produced, we are taking measures to protect trademark rights.

"We currently hold trademark rights in Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, and the European Union."

Fntastic has refuted allegations that The Day Before is a scam owing to it being pushed back close to announced release dates more than once.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.