Brad bailed and went on to sell Impulse to GameStop, who then scrapped it because, well, Steam had pretty much killed any/all competition. Just as I had predicted back in 2009.
In all my history, I tend to throw stuff out there not giving a moment’s thought to who listens let alone believes me. e.g. I did two articles for CGW (remember them) when I said that digital distribution was the wave of the future. One of them was back in the early 2000s. Here we are today.
^this. All of it. And thanks for admitting that I was right :)
ps: Sorry for the thread necro guys. Apparently my QT3 notifications weren’t working, so I missed all the fun. Someone sent me a ping on Discord asking why I wasn’t responding to this thread. So I just spent the past 30 (!) mins laughing my ass off.
Brad & I at E3 2003
Except none of that is true. Should I write a blog explaining this, or are you going to save me some time and just to the research?
P&L have a major barrier to overcome when it comes to willful intent; not to mention demonstration of monetary damages etc.
The fact that it all hinges on who owned and bought what and when, is enough for the judge to conclude that the whole thing was one big misunderstanding between parties. A jury trial is going to be an absolute toss up which can go either way because people are - for the most part - dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to things like understanding the complex nature of corporate law, let alone IP and trademark laws. They’re only going to listen to what the lawyers say, then flip a virtual coin in their brains.
Why you guys just can’t settle this for Pennies on the Dollar based on copies sold, and get it over with, is the sort of thing that multi-million Dollar losses are made of. You guys are both going to spend more money on legal bills than the IP is actually worth because, you know, attorneys have bills to pay too.
Oh btw, that Exhibit 6 of the lawsuit, is a massive Red Herring. Well done. God, I hope P&L tries to use that as some sort of evidence that Accolade acknowledged that they didn’t own the IP rights to SC:3. It would be funny as hell to read the judge’s response to that.
Also, that you guys aren’t planning on filing an injunction is odd. You can make concurrent claims and judges tend to rule on them in a single response which tends to just provide a 2-for-1 deal which tends to make litigants cry in their cornflakes.
Also, you don’t need a judge’s approval to DMCA a product. You can file it the minute the game goes on sale on any third-party site, and they are 100% obligated to remove it immediately. No questions asked. Then they will give Stardock a week or so to respond. That there is an active lawsuit over this very thing, is grounds that I can 100% guarantee will cause third-party sites to keep the product off their stores until either the case is settled or until P&F reach a settlement agreement with Stardock and ask those sites to lift the DMCA.
Anybody who remotely has any interest in buying ST:O knows they can go buy it directly from Stardock; and the losses from it not appearing on other sites is mitigated by the fact that - well - gamers are finicky bastards who don’t care who sells a game they want. They will just buy it where they find it. And if Stardock capitalizes on the DMCA and issues a limited time discount for those “Poor gamers who P&L are making party to a frivolous lawsuit”, your DMCA is effectively meaningless. Which probably explains why P&L “voluntarily agreed” to hold off. I can’t even stop laughing. It’s so transparent that it’s baffling.
ps: I have no dog in this race, so I’m just here for the lols.
What sort of value exactly? Unless I’m missing something, gamers just don’t give a shit about things like that.
I’d be interested in the blog if only because your take is so different than the prevailing one here.
That’s not true at all. A lot of people care a lot about which studio creates games. For instance the CoD and Assassin’s Creed games rotate studios and people have preferences between studios on which ones they will play and reviews almost universally mention this. There’s also a clear nostalgia factor that people use frequently for purchasing decisions. There’s a runaway crowd funding success story that has already supposedly raised $200M that you might of heard about which is funded entirely on the dreams of nostalgia.
I would agree that there are also a lot of people who don’t care at all about who makes a game and those people can skim over the text and just look at if the review is a 7 or a 9 with no harm done.
When book authors on series switch (or audio book narrators change on a series which should be illegal) this is universally brought up in reviews.
I don’t think reviews need to focus on this, but I think that it has value in a review.
A good example would be the sports interactive split from eidos. Anyone playing championship manager today, or are they playing football manager?
In this one post Derek:
- Continuously referred to Reiche and Ford as “P&L”, apparently as a really hilarious joke.
- Obviously thinks that Elestan is one of the principals.
- Believes that what Reiche and Ford really want is exactly the kind of licensing deal that they continuously rejected pre-2017.
- Thinks that this lawsuit is about SC3
- Thinks that whether a PC game is sold on Steam or as direct download from the publisher’s site will have little effect on sales.
So yes, I can certainly see how expanding this stream of consciousness to a full blog post form would be entertaining. The way the guy on the subway trying tell everyone about his theory of ether vortices is entertaining.
I like this post so much.
I wish we had a +1 button here, but yeah – that in a nutshell.
To be fair to Derek, while he’s not Paul or Fred I don’t believe he’s a random passerby, either.
Since apparently Stardock knows his full name and where he works if he were some kind of shill there’s little doubt that information would have been spread.
…he said, in a thousand post thread full of gamers giving a shit about things like that.
Hey, we’re not just gamers here. We’re like the Gamer Illuminati, the landed aristocracy of video games! We’re a breed of our own, unlike the rest of the rabble out there.
I’m absolutely not trying to be an asshole (it just comes naturally!), but if I’m reading the Discourse stats properly you account for roughly 25% of the posts. I think they’re saying that 92 people have commented in this thread, which is roughly 3% of the registered users on Qt3.
Basically, most people don’t care, but those who do REALLY care.
Thus some do care.
edit: Also for technical accuracy your math is off. It shows I’ve got ~250 posts out of ~1500. Around 16%
I imagine not all users are actually active users, i.e. people who’ve posted here recently?
Since the stats were mentioned 92 users is a lot for a thread here, especially for a sort of side topic. The SC:O thread has 130 and has been running since July of 2013 where this one has been up since just March of this year. The current bargain thread, which is long running and has lot of random participation is 168.
So if we were to use numbers here as the example there’s a large amount of interest in the lawsuit.
The launch appears to have gone off without much issue. There is no DLC offered in the steam market place.(beyond the soundtrack)
There are a few user reviews, vast majority positive. This particular one does not count for nothing, but I laughed none the less:
and it goes on to post his twitch account.