Back to collectionA Trademark Ultimatum Arrives as Players Question the Games
Background: Ex Populus had built its games business around the XAI name, while another company called xAI had announced plans to open an AI game studio. Today: A legal letter from Musk's side reached Ex Populus: unless it agreed to the other side registering xAI as a trademark worldwide, they would seek to cancel Ex Populus's US federal trademark, registration number 7,788,241. Impact and next steps: The team faced two choices: sign away ground or prepare to go to court.
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Background: Ex Populus had built its games business around the XAI name, while another company called xAI had announced plans to open an AI game studio. The naming conflict had lasted two years. The community was still publicly debating how airdrops could attract players, but the team faced a trademark decision that no product meeting could settle.
Today: A legal letter from Musk's side reached Ex Populus: unless it agreed to the other side registering xAI as a trademark worldwide, they would seek to cancel Ex Populus's US federal trademark, registration number 7,788,241. The chronology was clear. Ex Populus's side had used XAI in commerce since June 2023. A month later, Musk announced xAI, and the announcement received 59 million views. In November 2024, he announced plans for an AI game studio for xAI, bringing the businesses closer and deepening the confusion. The US Patent and Trademark Office had already suspended several of Musk's side's applications because of earlier rights. The letter was not public; the market showed no reaction and the token held at $0.051. Over the next two weeks, law-firm meetings outnumbered product meetings as the deadline to respond approached.
Impact and next steps: The team faced two choices: sign away ground or prepare to go to court. Earlier use and the trademark office's actions gave the smaller side a basis for its position, though the outcome was unsettled. That same day, a token holder wrote a long post questioning whether promoting games with airdrops could last. Games needed to be enjoyable and have a clear revenue model, the holder argued; subsidies could not continue forever. The holder wanted no reply, only for the team to survive until the next bull market. An official explained that partner games distributed those airdrops to key holders and set their own eligibility rules. The narrator recorded the pressures side by side: outside, a fight over the right to use a name; inside, a question about whether the games behind it could stand on their own.