Indie studio has its Discord username stolen out from under them

An indie studio has had its own Discord name stolen out from under them and has now issued a warning to other indie developers to beware. 

“A warning for all the indie devs waiting to claim their own username,” studio Rusty Lake writes on Twitter. “We just received an email that we, as Verified Owners, could finally submit a new username and wow… ‘rustylake’ is already taken! If we as a server owner with 240K+ members can’t even claim it…”

A warning for all the #indiedevs waiting to claim their own username @discord;We just received an email that we, as Verified Owners, could finally submit a new username and wow... ‘rustylake’ is already taken! If we as a server owner with 240K+ members can’t even claim it… 🤯May 19, 2023

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The issue arose a month after Discord announced changes to the way it handles usernames. Previously, usernames were case-sensitive and had a four-number identifier attached to the end of them. Discord is now removing those numbers and letting users choose new usernames, but they’ve been rolling out the changes gradually. That means some Discord users are being allowed to secure new usernames before others, and a few have already claimed the names of studios such as Rusty Lake. 

“Now we have a risk of impersonation and extra legal costs to file a possible trademark infringement,” says Rusty Lake. “In any case, Discord Support was helpful enough to respond with an automatic response email to this issue and the follow-up is directing us to another helpdesk.” The studio ended its note with: “Really wondering how they are rolling out this new feature... if a random user can squat on established (server) brand names.” 

Rusty Lake is the team behind several hit indies over the last few years. The studio primarily releases macabre point-and-click puzzle games with classic hand-drawn art styles. They even have a trilogy based on their own name with Rusty Lake Roots, Hotel, and Paradise. 

Discord has been in hot water recently with another update that implemented AI features onto the platform. Needless to say, it didn’t go down well with many players.