Ikea lawyers come after indie game developer

Ikea has fired off a cease-and-desist letter to a solo indie developer over alleged use of Ikea assets in their game.

Ikea has sent a cease-and-desist towards indie game developer Ziggy over their upcoming game The Store Is Closed, which Ikea accuses of infringing its rights.

The Store Is Closed is an upcoming survival horror game that places players in an “infinite warehouse” where players must scavenge supplies and build defences to protect against monstrous employees and managers. The gameplay is similar to a more horror-themed version of Rust, another survival crafting game.

While The Store Is Closed does not use copyrighted Ikea advertisements or logos, the game does feature some striking similarities — the signage of the items in the store, the colours of the fictional store name, and more are more or less directly styled after Ikea.

In the game, players will need to smash up furniture to craft items to survive. Picture: Ziggy

Speaking to Kotaku, Ziggy showed the legal threat he had received. “Your game uses a blue and yellow sign with a Scandinavian name on the store, a blue box-like building, yellow vertical striped shirts identical to those worn by Ikea personnel, a grey path on the floor, furniture that looks like Ikea furniture, and product signage that looks like Ikea signage. All the foregoing immediately suggest that the game takes place in an Ikea store.”

Ziggy disputes that he modelled furniture based on Ikea furniture. “I bought generic furniture asset packs to make this game. I don’t know what that means.”

Ikea stated that Ziggy had “ten working days of the date of this letter” to make changes to remove materials similar to Ikea from his game. It should be noted that this game isn’t set to release until 2024 and is currently not on sale anywhere.

“I was going to spend the last week of my Kickstarter preparing an update for all the new alpha testers,” Shaw stated. “But now I’ve got to desperately revamp the entire look of the game so I don’t get sued.” Ikea is a company that made nearly $40 billion AUD in revenue in 2021, and Ziggy is a solo developer whose fundraising campaign aimed to raise approximately $18,000 AUD for development.

You can wishlist The Store Is Closed on Steam right now.