Why was Deckard's name changed?

[GC13]

You know, I very quickly came to appreciate the change from elevators to teleporters (and it made your starting location make so much more sense), but why did Deckard get changed to Decker? Did Klei need to at least try to file the serial numbers off a bit?

[Darmok]

I believe it was changed to avoid copyright claims by whoever owns the rights to Blade Runner. In it, the main character is named Deckard and Klei used his name as a homage.

[Puritifyer]

Decker may have had his name changed from Deckard for a few reasons, but the one that comes to my mind is the rather strong similarity to the character Rick Deckard from Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

 

Whether Klei was interested in not making any references too straight forward or was trying to avoid some form of infringement on a copyrighted character is something I am not certain of.

 

 

^{On a less related note however: The intro to the game features both Deckard and Internationale having the same profile on Central's monitor with an incorrect starting loadout and skill set.}

[GC13]

Alright, so that's two people saying that, yeah, they probably had to file the serial numbers off a bit.

 

A shame—I liked "Deckard" a lot more.

[JimThePea]

I think Deckard was a little on the nose, Invisible Inc is its own thing, it doesn't need to borrow so obviously from other things. That said, Decker sounds like a Shadowrun reference so maybe they swapped one for another.