At the end of the day, all you truly want is a great space adventure game authored the Stardock style?  The actual "Star Control" name and past contents don't really make it or break it for you?  So, it could be called "Stardock: Origins"  (which would be a great way to tie in all the other properties), so long as Stardock does it the Stardock way you have come to love and enjoy, it would be fine for you?

...What? You're being unnecessarily defensive. He wasn't even talking about what Stardock should or shouldn't do, but rather what Lars would like them to do.

To those who keep defending Copyright Abuse, read this post and understand the damage that it is doing.

@Darkgildon If you are asking me my opinion, to be honest Stardock could call it whatever and as long as it has a good story, and good game play I will play it and tell my friends. 

However, the name 'Star Control' just sounds cool. It really does. I like it and well since its already on the label, I say lets use it. 

I have zero interest in learning about any of the characters in the UQM, SCI or II. I really could care less. If for example a game company used the same 'type of story' that was done in SCI or II, I would never know.

Again it boils down for almost everyone, and I speak for me and my circle of folks I know > (guys and gals in our late 40's and early 50's) that if the game play is good and the story is something to talk about (good), then that is all that matters.

We have been playing MMO's and games since 95 back on the Amiga. Ill tell my friends and they will tell their friends. ...and that is better then any advertising a seller can buy. 

Honestly my expectation is that Star Control: Origins will be in the same style as the original series. Same great story, adventure, quirky dialogue, great gameplay, amazing music, and good graphics. Sounds like once the drama gets sorted, we can have a return of the races we remember from SC2 that will have the same personalities as before, but in a new storyline (if I've understood previous posts around where the lines get drawn on what Stardock believes they'll be able to use). That to me would be a big win. I don't think I really care who's name is on the box as long as the game is what I expect it to be.

It's like my constant disappointment with the Masters of Orion reboots. They keep missing the mark badly. MoO 3 was a spreadsheet/micromanagement nightmare game and the MoO reboot I never played, but from the reviews and gameplay, seems like it missed the mark as well. Just give me MoO 2 with better graphics with some of the tedium of managing a large empire resolved and intelligent new features that enhance gameplay vs bogging it down. That's an auto-win for me. Sword of the Stars was an excellent space 4x in a similar grain as MoO 2. Shame the 2nd game was a disaster.

Anyways, I'm not going to judge SC:O until I have it in my hands. Everything I've seen has been promising and you have a team of passionate people working on it (big plus), so chances are it'll turn out to be a great game. Time will tell.

The timing alone was what made me suspicious of P&F, why allow SCO to be developed for 4 years? It doesn't make any sense to me. They shouldn't have allowed Atari to sell it in the first place, they are acting like 'copyright trolls' just waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

From what I read in rockpapershotgun:

Ford and Reiche’s counterclaim seems to be pushing to take control of Star Control again. They claim that, owing to various expiration and termination clauses in their agreements with Accolade, “all rights to Star Control, Star Control II, and Reiche’s Preexisting Characters used in Star Control 3 reverted to Reiche on or about April 1, 2001” – and they want a judgement to state that decisively.

This is what I'm referring to. According to this claim Atari shouldn't even be able to sell it in the first place right?

What I mean is, if there is truth in what P&F said then it means they are the laziest guys ever, why enforce it now?

And that is why I'm suspicious of them because they could have avoided it all if they enforced it before Stardock bought it in the first place. So all this mess is actually their fault for not enforcing it when they should which they said goes as far as 2001.

Or am I reading this wrong?

Yep, I remember when you were talking about going to the auction with the hopes of securing both Star Control and Masters of Orion. I was definitely rooting for you to get both because I was confident you guys would do them both justice. That being said, have you approached Wargaming.net about buying the MoO IP? Or perhaps alternatively they could license the IP for you to develop? They probably made out ok financially because it takes a while for folks to realize they've been duped, but I wonder what their appetite to keep trying is. I read that the owner of their company is super passionate about MoO as well. Maybe once you've recouped some investment from SC:O this will be easier to do.

I am definitely a die hard Star Control fan. My brothers and I used to play super melee with Star Control 1 all the time. It was a big deal when SC2 came out. I was banned by my parents from playing on the PC at the time, but I snuck downstairs, turned the sound down really low and installed it anyways. Eventually they found out and locked the keyboard away (like that would stop me), but I played that game into the ground. Absolutely loved it and my brothers and I played that super melee just as much as the last one (I was generally the king of super melee). I remember even hiding the star map when my brothers wanted a friend to "borrow" the game so they could play it. Since I paid for it with my money and given my experience trading/lending NES games back in the day, I wasn't about to let that starmap go! Good times...

This is interesting. I assume even Star Control: Origins needs some marketing - you simply need to make people aware the game exists, regardless of anything else.

But what you wrote i read as that the price difference between saying this "is Star Control" and this "plays like Star Control"  is 300 000 USD... thats kinda difficult to believe. You got to "say it" anyway, thats what you spend the marketing money on - as you want people to know about your game,  but otherwise, i am totally not convinced with your logic behind it.

I dont think you would get more people to buy Ashes, if you got license for SupCom and called it SupCom 3 instead - in other words, it is IMO mostly the SupCom fans who bought Ashes based on the promise its gonna be game in similar vein - the ones who did not buy it, were the ones who got to play it somewhere or saw some gameplay videos or read about things which made Ashes different and were not comfortable with those changes. I doubt someone failed to buy it, cause saying "it is like SupCom" was not enough to make it clear.

BTW, speaking of this licensing stuff, and knowing now that aside of StarControl IP you tried to get Master of Orion too, and i recall Homeworld too, i wonder what are the price for licenses to TV shows? Are they to steep to get to even consider or do the TV studios simply dont want to sell? Surely you are aware of acclaim and popularity the Star Trek Armada III mod for Sins is getting - and personally, while i am fine with just Sins sequel, i would bit your hands off, (and i am sure i am not alone), if you got Star Trek license somehow, and applied it on sins-like game. If Star Trek is too expensive, then perhaps Babylon 5? 

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 418

Actually, that’s a very good analogy.  

Wargaming bought the Total Annihilation trademark for something near $1.6M.  Why? Because that has a lot of name recognition.

If Ashes f the Singularity had been called Supreme Commander 3 (would have required design changes to make it a SupCom game) we’d probably have sold multiples of what it has sold so far.

Brand awareness is very valuable. Ask the latest owner of Atari.

 

That is the thing, you think you would "probably" sell more copies, but you have no factual data to support such claim, do you? Except the belief that brand recognition matters, which is something, i am not going to contest, as its indeed true - i just think it is more complicated and every case needs to be judged separately - in other words you could truly have more success with SupCom brand than with StarControl, as the former is more "contemporary" and better known among current player base.

Anyway, you say, if you had SupCom brand, it would have required design changes to make it SupCom game. You would have probably sold more copies. And how many of those additional copies sold would be down to those design changes you made to make it SupCom game in contrast to the numbers sold strictly cause it holds SupCom brand on the box?

Maybe if you made those SupCom design changes within Ashes, even without SupCom license, keeping the name Ashes, you would sell more? Cause whatever changes you made (like refusing Strategic Zoom in the early stages of the game) were reason why SupCom fans did not buy into Ashes as they otherwise would? 

What about the "Star Trek / B5" part of my previous post, care to comment on that? 

I dont have any background of that sort. And i am not saying that there is no empirical data on how important brands are. However, i doubt there is any study targeted specifically  on computer game brands and how these influence customers. Pretending its the same way and to the same extent as with sodas is... lets just say pretty much saying both are targeting same kind of customer. Surely its not that simple? 

So in other words SupCom 2 sold more than Ashes to this point, right?  You assume its because  the brand, and its surely to certain extent true, but you need to consider other reasons, why its not as successful.

With SupCom 2, the fans of the original game expected more of the same. That did not happen for various reasons.

Ashes, on other hand, was in its beginning:

- more compared to Total Annihilation that SupCom

- lacked strategic zoom, which is SupCom´s major feature, and even though you think average SC:FA fan my prefer Escalation over SC2 now, that might not have been true with vanilla game

- SupCom2 was pretty much full feature game at its release, having 3 factions, naval units, T4 units, superweapons, i assume proper single player campaign (never played though) - in many ways it felt pretty much compete product, regardless of the fact it was "worse" than SC1, which is more or less matter of subjective opinion. Meanwhile Ashes was at its release barebone game and some things are still missing (like navy). You said that much yourself and why it is that way (budget reasons).

These are IMO objective and valid reasons why not to buy Ashes, to someone, who liked SupCom, beyond the fact its named differently.

I give you though, if it was named the same, there would no doubt be people, who would turn blind eye on all its shortcomings and buy anyway based on the name (and be dissapointed as in case with SC2). The question is, would there be enough of them to return the initial investment on buying the IP? Obviously i have no way to know. I just think its not that clear cut that it is always worth it. Maybe with SupCom it would, but i have my doubts about Star Control in this regard.

I think the distinction he's trying to make is that there's a difference in design of the games that may have contributed to the difference in sales. Maybe that's true, who knows, those styles of games don't appeal to me and Brad is a lot closer to the numbers. It seems like you clearly have a beef with the design of AoS, but Brad is 100% correct that the brand/trademark holds a lot of value because people expect a certain style of product associated with that brand. A certain level of quality or design that they liked and draws them to games under the same brand/trademark.

Kind of like my example of Sword of the Stars. It had a strong brand value after the first game because a lot of people recognized the quality of the game and liked it a lot. That strong brand value drew them to the 2nd game, which was garbage. If they had called the second game "Alien Space Smash" instead with the exact same underlying game, they wouldn't have sold nearly as many units as they probably did.

For Star Control, the trademark has a high value to those that are interested in Star Control. Calling it something else wouldn't have the same draw, plain and simple. There are a lot of expectations as to the experience the player expects to receive when you call a game "Star Control". That identification to that trademark has a lot of value to those people who played it back in the day. For new people, they can go back and look at the old games and say "hey, that style of game play appeals to me" and it has value to them as well because they can play those old games if they so choose to help hook them into the new game.