There's bad news today for consumers who just can't seem to keep track of the differences between Mojang's upcoming tactical card/board game Scrolls and Bethesda's series of epic open-world RPGs The Elder Scrolls. Both companies have agreed to a settlement allowing Mojang to continue using the Scrolls name for its game, leaving it up to the poor, confused gamer to keep the similarly-named titles straight in their heads.

All right, the tone of that introduction might be a little misleading. In actuality, our joy over the settlement of the months-old legal battle probably matches that of Mojang's Markus "Notch" Persson, who tweeted his delight over the news this weekend with a "Yaaaay! <3."

In a follow-up tweet, Persson explained that while Bethesda will keep the "Scrolls" trademark, Mojang will be able to use the name so long as it agrees not to use it to make a game that competes directly with The Elder Scrolls series, which was never really an active concern in the first place.

Persson tells Ars Technica that there was no money exchanged during the settlement, save for "making sure lawyers got paid," which helped contribute to his continuing bemusement over this kind of legal wrangling in general. "I'm very happy we've resolved the matter, but it does seem silly for me that we have a system where two companies have to waste piles of money and time and end up in a situation where nothing has changed," he told us.

Mojang had previously (and apparently only half-jokingly) proposed a Quake III tournament between the companies to settle the trademark issue. While that never came to pass, Mojang prevailed in an initial court battle late last year, blocking a permanent injunction Bethesda sought to stop the company from using the "Scrolls" name in marketing.

Listing image by Image courtesy of Mojang