Stardock Sues Former Employee Over Ugly Elemental Launch

[laserwulf]

I couldn't help but notice the part where Miseta refused to return a company laptop. Maybe I'm just a BOFH, but if I were the Stardock IT guru I'd be looking at remote kill-switches for equipment that leaves the office. Don't want to return our laptop? Okay, hope you didn't have anything valuable on it... like from your several side-businesses.

 

[bificommander]

I would be more inclined to believe this (though still convinced, how many programmers were really diverted to redo marketing work. Sounds weird.) if Stardock didn't botch every second game launch since then. Stronghold 3 and Sword of the Stars 2 both launched in late 2011, and were complete and utter disasters too. I do like that Stardock keeps supporting niche PC genres, including genres that I personally like, but for the love of all that's holy, they need to step up their QA department and do some actual tests before launch.

 

[bificommander]

Doublepost, sorry

 

[Fractral]

I would have rather they stuck to making GalCiv 3 or more expansions for GalCiv 2. And if the game wasn't ready for launch, why launch it? Why not just delay it some time?

 

[ThunderCavalier]

I couldn't help but notice the part where Miseta refused to return a company laptop. Maybe I'm just a BOFH, but if I were the Stardock IT guru I'd be looking at remote kill-switches for equipment that leaves the office. Don't want to return our laptop? Okay, hope you didn't have anything valuable on it... like from your several side-businesses.

Yeah, I'm kinda surprised that no precautions were given to that little aside. They hadn't considered that an employee might take off with one of their laptops if fired or if they quit?

Anyway, if what I've seen is true and Stardock does have a small amount of people, it does make sense that some key programmers might need to have been put onto marketing in the wake of such a ridiculously stupid departure. I still don't see what kind of possible benefit she, or anyone, could have gotten from completely deleting the entire marketing of the game, but hey, people have gone crazy before.

But yeah, from what it sounds like, this seems like a solid lawsuit. They're at least gonna get some compensation.

 

[shiajun]

Uuh....lawsuit heavy season for Stardock. They sue and get sued, by Rebellion, for using the word "Rebellion" in the title of the recent Sins of a Solar Empire expansion.

 

[Valanthe]

And you never pressed charges? Did you just leave that part out?

You know, now that you mention it, I don't think we did, I was just a supervisor there, so while I was pissed he did that, I wasn't the one who had to pay to clean it up, and I ended up leaving that company in a far less dramatic way a few months later. He ditched town before that, but I don't actually know if they did press charges.

 

[Doug]

If its the Stardock I'm thinking of (the company that makes windows utilities), it's just him, 2 or 3 other full timers and a bunch of contract/part-time employees (or was the last I paid attention), so it's possible that they had to drop everything to redo the marketing. That being said, there's obviously a lot more to this story than we have heard.

Never heard of that Stardock but this one is a game developer, on a smaller scale but a top notch one at that. They specialize in sci-fi strategy games, such as Galactic Civilizations 2 (AI in this puts all others to shame) and Sins of a Solar Empire. They also had their own digital platform for a while, which I believe they sold to Impulse which got sold to Gamestop? Or something like that.

Elemental was supposed to be their fantasy setting strategy game, but they admit to over extending on too many projects and botching the release.

They're both the same Stardock - Brad started out making GalCiv I, then branched out into Windows utilities alongside game development (and started thinking about digital distribution).

Regarding Elemental - yeah, the initial release was kind of bland, in addition to being filled with game-breaking bugs. Part of the problem can be pinned on retailers requiring you to book a release date almost a year in advance - but the result was nonetheless a big failure to plan ahead.

On the upside, their Fallen Enchantress standalone expansion (which I got for free as a WoM purchaser) is coming along very nicely, with lots of neat spells and abilities (they picked up the lead designer for Fall from Heaven 2, the Civilization IV mod, to take charge of the game direction this time round).

I bought WoM too along while before release, and I was disappointed with it as well. But I was ok with that, as I'd taken a risk in buying an unfinished product. I do think it was pretty awesome of Brad to step in, admit the company's mistakes, and offer the two free 'expansion packs' (though honestly I think WoM:FE is more of a sequel that improves on the original than a simple expansion pack).

Brad as head of Stardock has generally been a pretty awesome CEO as far as I can tell, in dealing with customer/public relations. I still like to refer to his statement about why piracy is something you need to accept with game development and how to deal with it reasonably effectively (i.e. don't horse-whip the customers who could have pirated and didn't).

So, in regards to this lawsuit, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; but I doubt if we can ever be sure of what happened for absolutely certain.

I'm still happy to buy games with the Stardock label, and I've been saddened by the sale of Impulse to GameStop (which I'm guessing was something of a direct consequence of the failure of WoM). It's also sad that we've not really seen much else coming from Stardock at the moment, probably because of them focusing on WoM:FE and publishing Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.

Anyway, I still wish well for Stardock, and Brad in particular.