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

I see that the reviews for Star Control: Origins on Steam have magically moved up from 62% (mixed) to 70% (mostly positive) in the days since the game’s been back on sale. Hmm…

It’s probably showing a “recent reviews” window. The overall has hovered between 69-70 since release. Since the number of reviews in the window is small, a few negative ones dropping out of the window and a few positive ones being added makes a huge difference.

There was definitely a PR push to get positive reviews in response to alleged “review bombing” (which seems to have consisted of one inappropriate review that was removed).

Looking at the page the “recent reviews” total 30, so it takes just a couple of reviews to create that kind of % shift.

The game is perfectly serviceable for what it is.

I don’t think it’s required for Steam scores to reflect some sort of public referendum on the legal battle.

Could be. The weird thing is that the “All reviews” things says the same thing.

Of course not. But the weird thing is that the ratings were going down ever since the game launched until they levelled out at around the 62% mark before the game was taken off Steam. Then it re-appears and seemingly magically has increased its score to 70%.

Just threw me off for a moment.

Brad was trawling for positive reviews on Twitter recently to counter act what he believes to be bad faith reviews. It seems to have netted him a spike of 30 or so positive reviews.

KotakuInActionInAction

I would suspect only a small slice of those eighty two hojillion melodies are much good. But it doesn’t really matter. Composers have been shamelessly cribbing from each other for centuries. Just ask zombie Muzio Clementi what he thinks about Mozart’s “Magic Flute” overture. He’ll shake his decaying fist in anger over the wanton theft of one of his piano sonata themes.

To say nothing of “My Sweet Lord,” heh heh.

And that Bach guy totally ripped off Procul Harum.

And Simon’s American Tune cribbed extensively from Bach. In many ways, copyright law is far too overreaching given how real creative work actually happens.

@dsmart, is this the news you were referring to?

Now that the government has reopened, the last piece is in place for the endgame.

@Gordon_Cameron - Have you contemplated using this tactic to promote DerpSpace?

So apparently the game is back on GOG too, not just Steam.

Stardock’s announcement about SC:O returning to Steam and GOG:

Doesn’t add much to the story. Stardock repeats their claim of “DCMA abuse” and their critique of Paul & Fred’s hyperspace copyright analysis.

Oh, and…

…a game they are credited with having designed over 25 years ago.

The line that caught my attention is:

This sentence appears to be carefully constructed to lead the reader into improperly inferring a causal relationship between Valve and GOG becoming aware of the nature of the claims, and the game being restored.

You mean that’s it?

I think this quote deserves the gif more:

“This included all trademark rights to the series (i.e. any word or short-phrase from the franchise that is strongly associated with Star Control)”

How is it possible that his attorneys haven’t succeeded in disabusing him of the notion that a trademark automatically gives one exclusive rights to any word or short-phrase that is “strongly associated” with the mark.

Facial tissues are so strongly associated with the Kleenex trademark it’s become a generic term for the product, that doesn’t mean the holders of the Kleenex mark own the term facial tissue. Coke is so synonymous with colas, and even with soda in general, a entire region of the US calls every soda a “coke”, this does not mean the coca-cola company own the rights to the words “cola” or “soda”.

*Enjoy the sauce!*

Yes, that’s exactly backwards of how things go, unless they make sure their brand is distinct from the commodity, it loses protection - not that that is relevant to the Star Control trademark, just indicative of the nonsense of the argument.

Are the extra race DLCs still available from SD? Those seem to have completely disappeared.