I just sent him this. Read his response.
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.
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.
That was a most interesting exchange of emails, @Elestan.
It would seem that the plan was to cajole the UQM team into signing an agreement… which would probably end up as an exhibit in the lawsuit.
Yeah @Brad_Wardell added that comment after I hailed him on Twitter earlier today alerting him to the on-going furor now that the game was out.
At this point, I think it’s much ado about nothing. So I think leaving it alone, instead of continuing to fan the flames of discord, is what’s best. The community aren’t going to do anything differently now, than what they’ve done before with the IP. Regardless, creators have the legal obligation to enforce their IP and trademarks or risk losing claims to them.
Besides, we have bigger fish to fry in that the lawsuit is fast coming to a head, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out. I think a lot of people are going to be surprised - assuming it doesn’t get settled of course.
That’s true. In this case, Accolade decided not enforce any trademark on “Ur-Quan Masters” or the alien names, way back in 2001 or so. It allowed the UQM project to continue using those names, while Accolade (and later Atari) were not using them at all. So I think that ship has already sailed.
And actually, there’s a fair amount of evidence that Accolade never intended there to be any Trademarks other than “Star Control”. The SC3 manual puts ™ next to every mention of “Star Control”, but nothing else, and §1.5 of Addendum 3 of the 1988 agreement would contradict itself if the names of alien races were considered trademarks.
Just trademarks. You don’t risk lose your IP rights for anything else I’m aware of.
Correct. One of the things to look for is any time someone uses the term “the IP” they are being inaccurate. There is no “the IP” for Star Control. There are the trademarks and the copyrights, for various games in the series. They are not the same, and that’s the central fact in this dispute.
Agreed. However, the IP is standard nomenclature that tends to be used collectively to encompass copyrights, patents and trademarks, as in “Intellectual Property” - which btw actually has a legal definition.
A is pun in there somewhere.
Sure. In the common case those are all going to be owned by the same party, so it’s a handy shorthand. In this case, where the rights were explicitly separated years ago, it just causes more confusion.
You can lose the right to enforce them in specific cases, though (latches, estoppel, …). I’m far from a lawyer, but there’s plenty of laws protecting people acting in good faith for 17 years in every area in every jurisdiction, I’d be appalled if UQM was in any legal danger.
Nah.
First. a failed crowdfunding campaign–especially one run somewhere other than Kickstarter–doesn’t say anything about the game’s design or the size of the audience that might enjoy it. It speaks to the visibility of the project and whether it pushes some very specific buttons (nostalgia, aesthetics) that get people to cough up money before there’s even a product, much less any reviews.
Second, a StarCon-like is a complex game. It’s basically a story and several action games wrapped in a strategy/management game. Execution matters in a game like that, or the whole thing falls apart. The action games require satisfying controls (a thing that takes WAY more effort than most folks realize) and halfway decent AI. The strategy game not only requires lots of good balancing, but usually a lot of well-considered UI. Then you need to have appealing storylines at the heart of it! The team needs a broad skill set and the experience to execute on all those levels. I haven’t played Star Control: Origins, but if some of those things (I would say especially the action elements, since you engage in them repeatedly) are not a blast to play and the story (AKA, your reward) is not really memorable, then the player’s experience drags.
Sid Meier’s Pirates! is a similarly complex game, and it was updated several generations after the original and it worked. StarCon can too. And if someone could really execute on it, I’m sure there’s an audience for it. I can’t prove that, but why would the folks who love, say, FTL not love an updated Starflight or Star Control?
Not really on topic, but Pirates! Gold is one of my favorite games ever. I liked the updated version well enough, but I didn’t love it. Others have said similar things about remakes, but I think the pixel art of the original left more space for my imagination to fill in. The remake would have needed to go beyond the original in ways it didn’t to overtake it. (See XCOM & X-COM)
To try to tie this to the topic, I think making an updated version of a classic is HARD and I’m still a little baffled that either side is spending so much money fighting about it.
Heh.