Stardock owns Star Control and is planning an "XCOM-like" reboot

Why? They’ve been successfully putting out games.

This is exhibit E from the complaint:

This is what Stardock acquired from Atari. This was discussed with Paul and Fred at the time and understood.

I’m not sure what changed.

Okay, time to be straight with us here, Mr. Wardell. Tell us the truth: did you touch his hair?

Brad, for a little while the games were pulled down from GOG and it sounded like F&P wanted them pulled from Steam, etc. Now they’re back up, with Toys for Bob listed as dev and Stardock as publisher. What happened to get them reinstated? Was it an agreement with TfB, or just the stores recognizing your publishing rights over their objections?

This. Brad mentioned it upthread.

I need to get with the times apparently. I had no idea they were. I just assumed they’d left the field after Star Control 3 and were just re-entering the field.

Toys for Bob is owned by Activision who they made Skylanders for. You may have heard if it, it was kind of big.

They made Skylanders? Yowza, they should be set for life after that.

I’m sure it earned them some bonuses but Activision probably got a bulk of those profits.

Sometimes you need lawyers to get things like this sorted out. I’m kind of glad that the original creators didn’t just roll over, because reading all the legal stuff and what’s been posted in this thread, I think someone was planning this from the beginning and it wasn’t the original creators. He was just hoping that they would roll over and give him the rights he wanted without a fight.

That’s my opinion.

That is a rather uncharitable view to take, given the initial enthusiasm and fanboish posts Mr. Wardell made before it turned ugly. In almost all cases in reality, nobody planned to use lawyers. Only the extremely wicked do that.

Yeah, but if he knew what he had might not be totally legit to make the game they were already making without those two guys on board, wouldn’t he butter them up and keep asking them to join his crew? That’s exactly what he was doing over and over and they kept saying no thanks.

I also don’t see anywhere in the example he has posted twice where they agreed he owned what he now claims to own.

It’s pretty clear what Brad/Stardock bought. Nobody—and I mean NOBODY—was contesting that. I suspect the only question is if the seller had the rights to sell what they did. Like or don’t like Brad & Stardock, but I’d suggest doing it for reasons we know instead of conjecture based on drive-by commentary from invested parties (including Brad’s, to be fair).

But they’re not making this game with Toys for Bob, they’re making it independently, just the two of them at the moment, and they’ve said it’s SUPER early. It’s going to be a long time before there’s anything to see with Precursors, I’m sure of it.

I don’t think I agree. Yes, no one disputes that Stardock owns the trademark. You can see the evidence in Paul and Fred’s annoucement, which talks about The Ur-Quan Masters, but never talks about Star Control (except to elsewhere call themselves “The creators of Star Control™”.

But one point on conflict is in whether when Stardock supposedly got the publishing rights to Star Control if Atari actually HAD the rights at that point to publish the games (other than SC3) because they hadn’t been paying licensing fees to Paul and Fred, who claim that that means the games revert to their ownership.

And yet they don’t claim to be the creators of it. Because in the legal world, that has a different meaning. People on the Internet are raging about what creator means while looking over lawyer-speak.

Yea, I can’t really speak to that. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know what their legal objective was on that. On the other hand, my sympathy for that is limited by the fact that they used PR news wire to send out a press releasing announcing that I, Brad Wardell, am a thief despite not being a party of this lawsuit.

There’s no excuse for that crap… You can’t handwave that bullshit away.

It is the legal team representing your company that made that claim, yes? Maybe ask them about it. Is Stardock a party to the lawsuit? Are you no longer CEO of Stardock? It seems disingenuous to suggest you have nothing to do with the lawsuit.

And I will ask them what their intention was. I suspect there is a legal definition involved.

But frankly, I am not feeling very charitable right now about people who call me a thief or care very much about the opinions of people who are outraged about what some lawyer wrote in a lawsuit but don’t seem to have a problem with the personal attack on me in a press release.