The Third Doctrinal War -- Stardock, Reiche/Ford, and Star Control

For popular older games, part of it is a question of scale. Major popular/successful titles in those days sold very many less copies than is expected from Stardock size houses sales today. It’s a tough bet for a big win on something that old, regardless of all this other stuff.

Don’t even get me started on that one. I am already in a thread about it, and have been railing on them on Twitter these past few days. It’s not getting funded, and that pleases me to no end.

There’s a lot more competition, too. I mean, Star Control: Origins isn’t even on the frontpage of Steam anymore – four days later. That’s because of the enormous amount of stuff that gets released on the platform. I don’t envy them in that regard.

Yeah, I know. I’ve been keeping tabs on it. Nothing that I saw in the video or read about the game convinced me to pull out my wallet, though. I mean, I love Starflight more than Star Control, but there’s nothing about the new game that makes me very excited, apart from Greg Johnson being involved. And that alone isn’t enough for me.

No, which is why I used allegedly. In the post that included the screenshot above it was mentioned that someone on the private channel had sent that to him. Not something leaked from discovery. The second one with just the text the poster didn’t provide more context for.

It looks like there was a response from Stardock in that reddit thread that seems to amount to “these things were just said in anger, I didn’t really mean them”.

For the first one we have some provenance. It was sent to the admin of the UQM forums along with screenshots of the email correspondence between the admin and Brad being posted on the same chat. So it at least wasn’t totally random trolling, but someone who could get either access to the original emails or to a chat where those emails were being posted.

For the second, Brad replied and just said that he hadn’t verified whether the transcript had been edited, but seemed to agree that it’s the kind of thing he’s said on occasion:

The excuse really rings weak, and does not in any way absolve him of the blatant dishonesty of the different positions. It reveals that when motivated by anger he lashes out with little control of himself. It shows that his word is only as good as his mood at the moment. So he’s still completely dishonest, but also given to fits of rage.

This is why lawyers tell their clients not to talk about matters under litigation. When you’re the CEO of a company in that position, with the power to file lawsuits, send subpoenas, and get injunctions, what you say has consequences.

Plus, since all of Brad’s communications are currently subject to court Discovery, he had to realize that they could end up in public view eventually, whether or not anyone leaked them.

Yeah, so much fodder for discovery. As we’ve seen public statements from forums have already been used in some of the filings.

If those really are from the discord that was just for founders of the game, even there in that “private” chat to speak so freely under the assumption that nobody will find such statements objectionable and breach the weak confidentiality of the forum is just so foolish.

I would imagine the participants were under NDA, Though typically such NDAs for beta periods end on release. Unless they went out of their way to word the NDA to make it apply forever to what people saw on the discord chat there was no guarantee of it remaining private. I wonder if lifting of the NDA is exactly why these past statements are coming to light now.

I’m reading that now, and yeah, some serious table pounding. Points however for the use of the word “cacophony”. I really enjoyed that bit.

I’ve been thinking part of it is that it would be really hard to live up to the expectations. With the level of abstraction in the graphics back then I think a lot of experience was going on in our own heads, and with
the visual requirements today it would be hard or impossible to match that.

There’s obviously way too many factors to assign the exact impact of the various aspects of the design, production, marketing, and such.

That said, it does seem like spending the months leading up to release personally and individually alienating potential customers who were big fans of the series that they spent a ton of money on wasn’t a total success.

I just sent him this. Read his response.

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1043926435642200065

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, too. I liked these games mainly because of the interactions with the aliens and the story. I couldn’t care less about going down to planet surfaces to scoop up resources to be able to upgrade stuff – just put the interaction with aliens front and centre and tie the rewards to that. I’d be more than happy if the game was a glorified text adventure – just set the budget and the expectations accordingly.

Similarly, instead of forcing me to crawl through hyperspace at a slow pace (since I’m not getting any younger and my time’s limited!), just give me a starmap to set a destination and play a brief animation of my ship in transit. Something like in the old Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Game. Do like Darkstar One, which also featured a starmap, and have the range be limited by your fuel (requiring you to upgrade your ship).

And top-down space combat like this is also not very much to my liking any more. I mentioned in the other thread that I think The Long Journey Home did this style of combat better (thanks to ships firing broadsides), but if you have to have combat, I’d prefer something more along the lines of Starpoint Gemini (i.e. Star Trek: Legacy like capital ship combat with direct control), Starfleet Command or Nexus: The Jupiter Incident (more strategic), or EverSpace (straight up space shooter).

Anyway…

Just to note, with regard to his suggestion that a license was my idea, my suggestion was that Stardock offer a unilateral license, permitting UQM and any project under compatible licenses to use the alien names, etc. I’ve been noting for some time that any bilateral license would almost certainly be a trap.

tbh, I don’t even know why he bothered to do it when there was bound to be drama resulting from it regardless of how lenient and/or favorable it was. I would personally just have left them alone.

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1043932686010777600

Is the drama over the license agreement, or the threat to kill the project? I thought the main thing was the threat to kill the project, which as a threat, to me, seems to be on rather shaky ground. Outside of getting them to stop using the Star Control trademark with the domain, and the project id isn’t pretty much everything else they’ve claimed at the heart of the legal dispute with P&F and claims they’ve made as part of that? Or is the threat if you don’t sign this license agreement I’ll kill your project? I will have to read that thread again.

I was curious and checked. In this case it does not seem there are many bad actors abusing the review system, in neither camp.

Out of the most recent 20 (at the time of writing) “Steam purchasers” negative reviews, only 4 have a playtime under 2 hours, which is one of the indicators of possible review bombing (over 2 hours and you are talking paying clients). That’s just a 20% of the negative reviews, which is a low number in general even for games where review bombing is not suspected. The numbers might change if you go over 20 reviews, but I didn’t have time to check (20 is the number they show by default).

If you expand the review metrics to take in non-Steam purchasers (which will mostly be Stardock direct purchasers) the 75% positive reviews changes only to 76%, so we are seeing a lot of consistency there. And it points to no manipulation on part of the publisher either.

About DMCA takedowns in Holland

From the article

To re-iterate, compliance with the Dutch NTD Code of Conduct is strictly voluntary, so the Dutch ISP may or may not honour your takedown request. The more reputable ISP’s generally will, provided they have all the information they require and are sufficiently convinced you are the actual copyright owner. If your request is rejected, the ISP should be able to explain why, and give you a chance to provide further information and resubmit your request.

That’s Internet lawyering, but matches well my memories of similar attempts to blot out uncomfortable websites in the Netherlands. Like the Church of Scientology, which also is very creative with copyright law.

In Spain you would need to get a judge issue a takedown notice, and that’s not going to happen fast.

The EU parliament approved the draft of a set of EU laws to make the whole thing more uniform across the EU. Still, any such laws need to go through national parliaments, and both the Internet Megacorps and freedom of speech activists will be contesting that in the courts. It’s going to be years until that legislation takes effect.

So Brad threat is quite empty imo.

So, the UQM thread has been updated with the full text of the emails and licenses.

I do some analysis here. The short version is that Brad’s claims that we (I) asked him to have the UQM project sign a license are false, and his attempt to portray the offer as non-coercive is misleading, because what he actually told Serge was:

That’s not how you word a voluntary request.