Upper Deck Games Sues Ravensburger Over Disney Lorcana,

Upper Deck spoke yesterday about their lawsuit versus competing workbench game publisher Ravensburger and a previous Upper Deck game designer, Ryan Miller, for tangibly stealing and copying Upper Deck’s original game which Ravensburger repackaged and marketed as Disney Lorcana, which is set to release at Gen Con as Ravensburger’s marquee release for 2023.

“We invested significant time and resources to develop a new and novel trading vellum game. Our current leadership values the importance of protecting the intellectual property of both Upper Deck and its licensors,” said Upper Deck President Jason Masherah.

“We want gamers and fans to protract enjoying and having wangle to unique, innovative and immersive trading vellum games,” widow Masherah. “We encourage competition in the industry, but moreover strongly believe in playing by the rules to ensure the gaming polity benefits from the variegated creative choices by each manufacturer.”

The official complaint as filed in San Diego County is against designer Ryan Miller as well as Ravensburger. The legal document states that equal to Upper Deck, Miller was under their employ as a freelancer working on a game tabbed Rush of Ikorr that took a year of development. He left Upper Deck surpassing the project’s completion and it unfurled without him with Upper Deck filing a patent for it this year.

The cadre of their lawsuit is that Miller tangibly took the mechanics of Rush of Ikorr and transplanted them into Lorcana, and did so in violation of his contract and in violation of Upper Deck’s ownership of his work washed-up under their employ. They moreover required that Miller didn’t unroll any discussions with Ravensburger or that he was leaving for a competitor of Upper Deck and that the lack of disclosure constitutes a zippy charade by Miller.

Ravensburger itself is so-called by Upper Deck of not doing due diligence on his hiring or prototype, and that he was “aided and encouraged” in these acts. Upper Deck claims that the production of Lorcana will hurt their own release and provide unfair competition.

Should the lawsuit go Upper Deck’s way, Lorcana would not be worldly-wise to release publicly as part of the terms laid out by Upper Deck. That initial release was set for Gen Con 2023, and it’s unclear if the suit will stupefy that timeline.

We reached out to Ravensburger for comment and got this response from an official spokesman: “Ravensburger has not been served with a complaint and thus cannot speculate on potential legal matters. We at Ravensburger stand overdue the integrity of our team and the originality of our products.” 

As this is a developing story we will update it as new details and minutiae come to light.

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