The Magic to Master Kickstarter campaign is now on hold after the team behind the project was sued by Gameforge over copyright infringement.
If you visit the game’s Kickstarter campaign page, there is currently a notice that it's unavailable due to being “the subject of an intellectual property dispute”, along with a link to the copyright notification document.
Looking into the details, Gameforge has sued because they claim that the Magic to Master project has stolen materials from Metin2. Gameforge is the company that owns the copyright on this game and all of its audiovisual content.
“The infringing content uses stolen parts of the Metin2 game engine and pretends them to bei their own product. Members of their team have been associated with Gameforge in the past, legal actions against these persons are already on their way. We - Gameforge - are not related to this infringement nor accept illegal activities associated with it.”
The action comes after, as indicated in the notice sent to Kickstarter, that legal action is being taken against the team. Several members of the team behind Magic to Master seem to have been associated with Gameforge in the past, and the company is declaring that their resources and intellectual property has been improperly used in this new Kickstarter MMORPG.
This comes weeks after the launch of the Kickstarter campaign where the team used fake testimonials from outlets like MMORPG.com and Game Rant. The team later pulled those fake testimonials, saying that they were effectively placeholders and responding to our inquiry with “This was purely for testing purposes. We forgot to remove it due to our excitement. We apologize for this misunderstanding”.
It seems like this will take awhile to be resolved, and in the meantime, we'll have to see how the legal action will go and what becomes of Magic to Master.