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

You mean you know who you want to win.

Sure, if you wish. P&F deserve to win – in my opinion.

Access to money gives you access to the best attorneys, and while this can get you some advantages, but that in no way guarantees a victory.

The real advantage of finances in such cases is the threat of one party against another to bring a lawsuit, because then that in turns cost dollars the other side may be unwilling to commit. But once the lawsuit is moving forward, those sides have committed funds and it comes down to arguments (which your high paid attorneys make).

With this case both parties are well passed that threat juncture. They will either settle (avoiding the risk of a loss) or roll the dice with a trial. The emotional nature of the case for both parties makes me feel they may actually go for the latter.

True. And yeah, it does seem unlikely they’ll settle at this point.

If I was them, I sure as heck would think I own what Stardock is trying to steal and would see it through to the end.

Sure they may be pissed off from insults and what they see as false claims to what they see as their property, but a nice settlement which would pay handsome royalties to get value from that property, keep it relevant, and allow them the freedom they desire to pursue something alternate would be just as nice for them

It could be that emotional force that wants to prove them right and Stardock wrong that may be driving them. It also may be due to Stardock’s statements and actions that they have a very great deal of leverage against SD. This may not be emotional for them, it could be calculated to reach a better settlement.

On the SD side, why continue to raise your internal cost of the product…? Maybe even to the point where the whole thing was a loss and the purchase of the trademark turns out to have been a disastrous idea. SD’s actions do not appear business oriented or rational to me at this point. I believe they have a lot to lose, where PF really do not.

Well said. I genuinely dont see the point of this legal stuff any more. The market has given the modern value of the Star Control brand now.

I am assuming (just a guess) that it will make a million or so bucks in profit this year then a few hundred grand next year. Is it really worth spending more in legal fees than the IP’s value?

Unless SD is thinking of a sequel, both sides would be well advised to gently drop the matter imho. SD should let PF make their game, PF should let SD sell their game. Best case if PF launches a new SC game in a few years then Stardock’s game would get a halo effect and gain some extra sales.

Not really a win/win but at least its not a lose/lose.

If steamcharts is accurate it is still sitting at 20k - 50k owners after a month. It looks like it is selling on gog.com, not sure how much that would add on top. Seems like they would need a bit more though to turn a profit on what was spent in development.

Thats good money at full price. I have no idea how much the dev costs are but I would guess maybe ~~$3M? I can see them making a solid profit on it by end of year. I just think it would be a bit silly to throw away that profit on a legal battle whose outcome is now irrelevant to SD’s game sales.

Of course if they are planning a sequel then that is a different matter but I would be surprised.

Stardock has stated in legal filings that the development costs were over $10 million (not including marketing).

There were some ramblings on reddit on it costing $9M, but I find it hard to believe. But I think they are planning on many DLC/expansion/sequels and that maybe the inflated development costs cover these.

Edit: I missed there was an official figure. $10M costs for the game would be Star Citizen levels of mispending (or very creative accounting. ie: assigning 100% of company overhead for five years and engine development to the game budget). It has to include a lot of content not yet released or it makes little sense.

Oh wow. Yeah scratch my comments. I would just bail on it as fast as I could then.

@Juan_Raigada I agree. Maybe they built a new engine for it? Not sure really but that seems a lot for what i have seen of the game.

I am sure the current legal costs and the trademark buy-in are a non-negligible part of the costs as well.

EDIT: Just the $10m essentially means 375K units at full price.

Trademark buy in was $300k, if I remember correctly.

Brad kept saying how Star Control: Origins was the most expensive game they’d ever done. I noted earlier that, based on SteamCharts (for what it’s worth), the game probably qualifies as a flop. Steam reviews (which say little about sales) are now around 71% and have been dropping slowly ever since release, which seems to reflect how the game’s been received in general.

I cannot imagine Stardock will want to sink a lot of money into the lawsuit, but perhaps it’s become a matter of pride at this point. Or they’re counting on DLC and sequels to pick up the slack, Elemental-style. Just all guesses at this point, obviously.

Steamspy brackets owners to 20,000 - 50,000…

I don’t SD has been entirely rational for a while, @mok. As Rod says, the market speaks.

Well, don’t forget that it’s not just official DLC, but player generated content that they expect to become available for players, and they’re probably hoping that makes for a long sales tail. The problem is, only a tiny fraction of your players will make player generated content. And only a fraction of those will make PGC worth playing!

And suing R&F probably alienated some of that small portion that can make PGC worth playing.

A question: for a company the size of Stardock (i.e. not massive, but not five guys in a garage) is it still normal to have legal counsel on retainer? And if so, does pursuing a lawsuit in this way cost over the retainer, beyond not having them focus on other tasks?

I (obviously, from this post) don’t know how any of that stuff works, I was just wondering how much it really is costing Stardock, purely from a legal bills point of view.

To the former, probably. It just depends on the company. A retainer is something you pay to a lawfirm to get a regular amount of legal stuff done because you can’t afford/don’t have your own in-house counsel. This is more low level legal stuff, though.

A retainer wouldn’t cover an expensive lawsuit though (if you could afford to pay a retainer that large - remember this suit is projecting to cost multi-million dollars, never mind results - you would just hire lawyers), so Stardock is likely still going to be paying up for this.