Isn’t early marketing essential divorced, to a large degree, from quality of the game? If anything, heavy marketing can overcome bad quality- we see it all the time in movies.
The argument here isn’t about whether “good” Elemental would have made more than “bad” Elemental (i.e., the real Elemental). Heck, if the game was good at lauch, they delta would have been more than $1 mil.
Rather, the argument is that Elemental (exactly as it was at launch) would have made $1 mil more had this employee not damaged the company. That seems a reasonable possibility. In other words: would a bad game have made more with better marketing? Often, the answer is yes.
As to the complaint, that’s the nature of lawsuits: the plaintiff must state as many causes of action and reasons to support its causes at this stage. It doesn’t mean that they’ll put all those in front of a fact-finder, but they’re going to throw it all out now.
Sure it is. Wardell can claim that he lost 1m in profits due to a marketing snafu that occurred three weeks before everyone knew just how horrible the game was, but it will be bullshit. Especially when the game had in september 2010 only sold 85,000 copies. 85k copies at $40 a piece comes to 3,4m by the way, and that’s not all profit.
In fact I’d be surprised if Wardell isn’t claiming more than elemental actually has made in profit so far.
The only useful number in here is the $5000 spent asessing and restoring the lost data.
Yeah, I get that legally this a perfectly viable reason to take someone to court, I suppose, but in the end anyone who has played Elemental knows it’s complete bullshit and (at least from my own point of view) casts Stardock in a somewhat desperate and unflattering light.
The way I try to judge these things is basically using a reverse summary motion standard: if we assume facts that are most favorable to Stardock, is the suit reasonable?
If this employee did the alleged acts, that’s some eggregious shit. The ultimate damages can be determined later, but intentionally deleting all that material on the way out the door deserves a spanking, if true.
Isn’t that pretty much exactly the opposite of what the “Gamer’s Bill of Rights” and Stardock’s corporate identity is supposed to be all about? I mean, you’re saying that with better marketing Stardock could have basically tricked more people into buying a terrible game. That may be the case, but it’s pretty gamer-unfriendly!
If theft occured, Stardock is probably required to press charges as a company to protect itself. They probably have a lawyer hired who does these things. We do this in my company and I’ve been part of it before. Its very automatic and just something that is part of running a busines and has absolutely nothing to do with quality of game/product.
At least, if it follows somewhat the same rules as Denmark
While it may seem personal to you guys, its as far from it as possible.
I was under the impression that Stardock is a privately owned company and as such is not required to engage in lawsuits like these. Could be wrong, though.
I consider law discussion, or discussions that have relation with laws a unpractical topic for forums. How can people in a internet forum talk about these things if are not a) lawyers, b) the people suing c) the people sued. Its hard.
The Gamer’s Bill of Rights is a pipedream. I’ve personally never bought a game from SD because I thought they were nicer than the other guys. I bought (or didn’t buy) each of their games on its merits, which included whatever company policies were in place for that game.
That’s a really odd statement to make. The lawsuit has nothing to do with gamers, the lawsuit is about a former employee being accused of damaging the company leading up to the release by taking/destroying marketing materials. That’s it.
This woman certainly doesn’t have a million dollars, nor does stardock expect to get any money or even go to court. My guess (and it is just a guess) is she is threatening to sue for wrongful termination or sexual harassment and they’re slapping her down hard.
It would have to be constructive wrongful termination then, because she apparently quit without notice and nuked the materials on the way out the door.
The Stardock corporate name has/had a fair amount of goodwill. They presented themselves as having a certain corporate identity based on fair treatment of their customers. As a result, Stardock’s legal activities are relevant to the perception of goodwill in the Stardock name. In fact, Stardock has widely apologized for releasing Elemental. Despite this, the legal argument presented by Stardock here is that they would have preferred to sell more copies of Elemental. If Stardock really cared about its customers, it should be glad that fewer copies of the game were sold.
Defendant also deleted, destroyed and/or stole all of Plaintiff’s Analytics.
Defendant also deleted, destroyed and/or stole all of Plaintiff’s Trade Show Information.
Plaintiff was thus forced to expend more than $5,000 assessing the damage caused by Defendant’s actions and attempting to restore the Elemental Materials, Analytics, and Trade Show Information.
There’s your bits that are decent, if they’d gone with that I doubt anyone would have batted an eyelash at it.
Additionally, the interruption in availability of the Elemental Materials caused Plaintiff to
lose more than $1,000,000 in profits.
The date Defendant deleted, destroyed and/or stole Plaintiff’s Analytics, Elemental Materials and Trade Show Information was approximately three (3) weeks before the launch of
Elemental.
As a result of the loss of the Elemental Materials and Analytics, Plaintiff was unable to complete marketing efforts vital to the success of Elemental.
Additionally, Plaintiff had to spend vital time leading up to the release of Elemental
attempting to re-create the Elemental Materials, rather than programming, debugging and otherwise readying Elemental for release.
As a result of the loss of the Elemental Materials, and the detraction from programming, debugging and other responsibilities, Elemental was unsuccessful in the marketplace, earning a fraction of its anticipated profits and causing Plaintiff damages of over $1,000,000.
You will probably read this thread, though I presume you know well enough not to comment in it. But on the other hand, you must have green-lit the filing of this lawsuit, so maybe I have to explicitly spell it out for you: do not comment in this thread. Otherwise your lawyer will probably fire you. Heaven knows, your PR people probably don’t want to deal with you ever again. If Stardock uses an external firm, they are probably trying to figure out right now if they really need to have you as a client.
Congratulations!
You waited almost two years to file against the ex-employee
After two years you still haven’t completely redeemed Elemental for the people who got burned by its initial release
You clearly didn’t inform or completely ignored the advice of your PR people in regards to filing this lawsuit because:
On a PR Pros/Cons sheet regarding this lawsuit there is nothing in the pros column
You are not going to get a million dollars out of an ex-marketing employee. The best your going to do is force them into bankruptcy from legal bills and flush tens of thousands of dollars of your own money down the drain for an exercise in vengeance justified perhaps in your own mind as an exercise in ‘principles’.
So, you will get zero income from this lawsuit, only costs, and nothing but negative goodwill, truly a good judgement call on the part of the CEO that will have a positive financial impact on Stardock. /sarcasm
Don’t get me started on not filing any exhibits except for a one page NDA.
You know those business decisions where a couple years later you wondered why the hell did I do that? This will be another one of those.
Note that 26 doesn’t say that it only cost them $5K to be made whole (i.e., as if the damage hadn’t occurred). They spent $5K assessing and trying to recover materials. Presumably (based on 27-31), they weren’t able to get it all back.
He’s not a fool. There’s some other reason why he’s suing her two years later. Like I said above, my guess is that she’s threatening to sue for wrongful termination or an abusive working environment to essentially blackmail a couple hundred grand out of him and this suit’s ONE MILLION DOLLARS figure is intended to shut that right down.
The alleged offenses also render her unemployable in her chosen profession, so if he loses there could be all kinds of damages awarded in the countersuit. That means his attorney is sure they’d win.
I wonder if Stardock needs some help with their storage/backup policies? If a marketing employee can successfully destroy anything then something is very wrong in the IT shop.
