Rolex filed two new trademark lawsuits in the United States this week, going after Epic Games over a watch in Fortnite and after an NFT marketplace over crypto-branded token listings. It is the latest sign that a luxury house with one of the most vigorously defended trademarks in the world has no appetite for either of the two digital fronts where watch brands usually stay quiet: first-person shooter cosmetics and non-fungible token collections with slogans playing on luxury branding.
A gun-style skin and a random-box merchant
The first case, filed October 1 in the Southern District of Florida, targets Epic Games and Trick Studios, the creators of Fortnite. Rolex says Trick Studios’ BURGER SE (Sausage Royale) game includes a gun-styled watch, a “Gun-Watch merlin with a 32-inch gold bracelet and an 18-carat gold sunburst dial”, in the hands of the Sausage Royale game character. The complaint frames it as a watch with no watch-face import: the eyeballs appear at Virtual Mercantile boxes in the game, where random loot-box style purchases pay for these items, and Rolex claims they are offered at prices that “cannot display the number 60” in browser versions of the game, allegedly because the developer printed boxes using the face diameter role advertised by Rolex.
That is an odd way to describe product naming. Rolex’s filing says the merchant boxes used names like “SATNDARD BTRL CERAMIC BLACK GOLD WATCH”, with a misspelling of the word standard that Rolex reads as a deliberate device to game search engines. Epic and Trick Studios have not commented on the case.
The second case was filed in Florida federal court on October 2 and targets Viewdex Ltd, the company behind the viewdex.com NFT marketplace. Rolex says the platform hosts NFT collections with straplines playing on the Rolexes’ own marketing, including a slogan “I wish it were it, and I glad I am” that the filing describes as a mutilated version of the brand’s own “I wish it were” tagline. According to the complaint, one collection of tokens backed by crypto branding sold for more than $103,000, and the company claims the collections have generated at least 45 ETH in secondary trading volume since they went live this month.
The NFT collections Rolex is objecting to sit at the boundary that US trademark law has spent two decades circling without landing: a token that references a brand without claiming affiliation is a bet on how a judge reads consumer confusion. Collections built around luxury watch designs, pricing hardware that never runs and empty references to the theory of a Rolex product have ended in different outcomes in courtroom history, most famously Hermès’ win over MetaBirkins in 2022 and Yuga Labs’ win over Ryder Ripps in 2023.
The pattern behind the filings
Nothing in Rolex’s two complaints is legally novel. Watch and jewelry houses have an unusually clean record in trademark actions because their marks are registered for this precise harm class and courts have repeatedly held that a physical design so distinctive is an easier case to prove dilution on than a generic brand name. What stands out is the volume: this is the second such digital-sphere filing Rolex is reported to have opened this month, and the two complaints landed 24 hours apart. Legal sources following luxury IP say the brand’s long-standing US legal team is handling the filings, though Rolex has not confirmed the engagement on the record.
Both complaints ask for injunctive relief, the destruction of infringing materials, damages and the transfer of the disputed domain names and token wallets. Epic has not filed a response. Viewdex has not filed a response. A Rolex spokesperson declined to comment on pending litigation.
The NFT industry has been here before. In the MetaBirkins case, a federal judge ruled that NFTs are products for trademark purposes and awarded Hermès about $113,000 in damages, a number that mattered less than the precedent: branding a token line with somebody else’s trade dress is not commentary that automatically shelters under the First Amendment. Nothing in the BMW, Nike or Hermes dockets suggests a different view of a watch strap printed on a JPEG.
Epic’s case is a different contest and a harder one. The Fortnite items sit inside a large fictional game world and teams defend them as parody, a fair use argument that has held in some visual art cases in the Second Circuit. Rolex’s filing argues consumer confusion, mistaking the in-game item for a licensed product. Online game cosmetics are a low-stakes purchase, at $3.99 to $19.99 per item, which lowers the bar for a claim that a buyer might care, and Rolex’s own claim of higher-priced licensing deals for watch-branded game items elsewhere gives the confusion argument its footing.
Why the two cases will not move at the same speed
The procedural timelines diverge sharply. An NFT marketplace case typically begins with a takedown letter cycle and, if it survives that, moves to summary judgment language within a year, on a record built from token mint metadata and wallet flows that are already public. Epic’s case runs against a far longer discovery clock, with motion-to-dismiss briefing that can consume six months before either side files a substantive answer, and a parody defense that courts have treated differently each time it reached a jury.
There is a commercial layer as well. Game publishers sign licensing deals with watch brands precisely because the items sell, and Rolex licenses its name into products when the terms suit it. The plain reading of the Fortnite filing is that the house would rather sell approval in the metaverse than litigate around it. The plain reading of the Viewdex filing is narrower: the NFT collections copied trade dress and slogans, and the marketplace hosted them.
Neither case will produce a ruling quickly. What both complaints already establish is that the largest luxury watchmaker treats digital goods as ordinary trademark territory, with the same filing cadence and the same damages demands it applies to counterfeit graduates in Stuttgart or Shenzhen.