No Man’s Sky wins secret legal battle with Sky over the ‘sky’ bit because you can own single words apparently

Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray has revealed No Man's Sky's three year legal fight over the word ‘Sky.’ Apparently the broadcaster of the same name is pretty zealously guarding that three letter word.

It might sound ridiculous but, as Sean points out, the TV giant went up against Microsoft, over its cloud storage when it was originally going to be called ‘SkyDrive’, forcing a change to OneDrive. So, as stupid as legal ownership of a single word might be, it’s a pretty big deal that Hello Games won.

This is the same folks who made Microsoft change Skydrive to Onedrive... so it was pretty serious17 June 2016

It's possible this could have contributed to No Man's Sky's recent delay. Changing a name is a big deal when you've spent years building up brand awareness, so the team are probably quite pleased to keep the title everyone knows about. And Sean at least is seeing the humour in the situation.

On the plus side perhaps this is the real reason Skynet never happened...18 June 2016

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I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for guides. I also write reviews, previews and features, largely about horror, action adventure, FPS and open world games. I previously worked on Kotaku, and the Official PlayStation Magazine and website.