Not sure if you're intentionally reading selectively, but like I said - if they needed someone to reproduce some marketing material it'll be designers and artists - who would NOT be touching the game in the final 3 weeks. Programmers and QA are the ones doing the hard work on a game at the end. If it's simply gameplay footage/screenshots you can put the art director and a producer on it. If it's something more specific to a marketing person, you definitely do not put development people on it. And also like others said - any developer/publisher worth anything has backups. And I seriously doubt a marketing person has access to backups (edit: to do anything malicious to them) - those would be kept safe by IT and in outside facilities.
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Stardock sues former employee for $1,000,000 over the failure of Elemental
- Thread starter ruuk
- Start date
Not sure if you're intentionally reading selectively, but like I said - if they needed someone to reproduce some marketing material it'll be designers and artists - who would NOT be touching the game in the final 3 weeks. Programmers and QA are the ones doing the hard work on a game at the end. If it's simply gameplay footage/screenshots you can put the art director and a producer on it. If it's something more specific to a marketing person, you definitely do not put development people on it. And also like others said - any developer/publisher worth anything has backups. And I seriously doubt a marketing person has access to backups (edit: to do anything malicious to them) - those would be kept safe by IT and in outside facilities.
In a small company like that people do multiple jobs. Like I said, I doubt the art people are just art and they still have to do their own work in addition to hers. QA would suffer if someone had to leave that role to do the marketing work. It might not have been a programmer but on a 20-40 person team every person counts.
I guess we'll see if it goes to open court.
Here's the credits for the game and remember not everyone listed would have worked for them directly or at the time this happened: http://www.allgame.com/game.php?id=67398&tab=credits
Yep.
Tylahedras
Banned
A lack of marketing could cost a game a lot more then 27,000 units. Or it could cost a lot less, that's kinda the problem with the suit having a dollar amount associated with it.
Shouldn't this be a strictly criminal case? As in you stole our property and destroyed it, go directly to jail do not pass go do not collect 200$?
I don't really want to see the world where a guy robs my house and I sue him for 100k because of mental anguish...
Palette Swap
Member
Brad should be fucking glad too many people didn't buy this game. This steaming pile of shit is damaging to Stardock's image.
reptilescorpio
Member
If employee stole or deleted stuff then they are in trouble. Don't think they will be able to quantify the damages of shifting programmers into PR roles though.
Random thought but when Impulse had a lot of traffic during sales they may have had to reallocate staff who were working on Elemental onto keeping Impulse up and running.
Random thought but when Impulse had a lot of traffic during sales they may have had to reallocate staff who were working on Elemental onto keeping Impulse up and running.
They definitely did. That's the reason they gave for selling was that it was stretching their staff too thin trying to run it.
ElectricThunder
Member
Sigh, this seems pretty messed up on all fronts.
Wonder what's next at this rate for Fallen Enchantress..."Sorry guys, Industrial Espionage by Paradox!"
Wonder what's next at this rate for Fallen Enchantress..."Sorry guys, Industrial Espionage by Paradox!"
Cameron122
Member
Elemental was one of the great gaming disappointments of my life. So bad 
This was the original release. It has nothing to do with the version they're working on.
Hey, just a thought, but shouldn't a development studio have some sort of network system in place to back up important data? Or do they just store all the marketing stuff worth apparently $1 million in C:\MY DOCUMENTS\1_MILLION_DOLLARS_DO_NOT_DELETE\
Is the next GalCiv one bad lightning strike away from being erased forever or something?
Is the next GalCiv one bad lightning strike away from being erased forever or something?
I think he's insinuating that Fallen Enchantress will be as big of failure as the original and because of that they will have to find a new scapegoat
The War of Magic game won't be finished until Fallen Enchantress is released which is what War of Magic should have been.
Probably but we don't know details yet. In the suit, it also mentions her deleting trade show information, analytics and a few other things I believe so she may have been some sort of administrator with access to backups. The suit specifically mentions in one of the claims that she "knowingly caused the transmission of a program, code and/or command to Plaintiff's computer which caused the destruction of data and information contained thereon."
I'd say that mentions she had access to and destroyed the backups as well.
They also say she stole her laptop and conducted outside business on company property and during business hours.
Here is the summation of disputes they are leveling at her (edited to take out some irrelevant legal stuff):
Like I was saying earlier, I think the suit might be referring to Brad himself. He's the boss but he's also one of Stardock's main programmers but of course when this craziness took place, I'm sure he had to haul ass to make adjustments.
He did at first until he recovered from crunch and reality set in.
Crunch makes normally competent people stupid if carried to an extreme. It took Tom Chick slamming his game for Brad to come to his sense- gotta remember Brad never had a game got criticized heavily, so he didn't think he could make a bomb.
He did do a while panel on why Elemental failed over at GDC in 2011.
The first thing Brad did after coming to his senses was hire Derek Paxton, which was a brilliant hire. Jon Shafer was a good hire as well, I blame Civ V on Take 2, not Jon, who is a good designer.
As for this lawsuit, I think everyone knows the $1mil figure is overblown, but you have to start with a figure, and it's known that she has filed a claim against Brad for something as well, so this is probably part of that process. I'm not going to worry about it, it's not going to impact their games- and Stardock has a good rep for hiring female workers and treating them well/giving them responsibility, so I'm inclined to think Brad isn't Aris.
You guys have to separate your personal dislike for Brad (which I think is undeserved, but I can't change minds) for what is actually going on here.
The key thing is that she appears to have already won her case against Brad - and Brad specifically, not Stardock. It's not a countersuit in the traditional sense.
Is there any info on what she sued Wardell over?
Brad was pretty much candid on the whole Elemental failure/debacle at the time. Or better said, after the release of the game and the reviews started pouring and users started complaining. Never the possibility of sabotage was mentioned in the reasons for this. If this employee destroyed marketing data and company property/assets then sue her for that not some optimistic prediction of lost sales not taking into account the bad reception the game had.
The very questionable part of this suit is that it looks like a personal retaliation by Brad Wardell after losing a lawsuit and appeals done by the marketing person and is being performed under the guise of Stardock. Found the other forum where this was dug out from and it seems there's no info yet about what that suit was about.
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=3195523#post3195523
She could be guilty of it but it's like he's only pressing charges now for revenge which cements my opinion about his character.
The impression I got was that the lawsuit was still going on, and that Brad's attempt to have it dismissed were what he lost.
Edit: it looks like Brad Wardell was going to post a response on this article, but he removed it from his personal blog.
Ah yes, my mistake, apologies.
DodgyGeezerFella
Member
Stardick.
GungHo
Single-handedly caused Exxon-Mobil to sue FOX, start World War 3
Ok. Then why did these fuckers take my money two years ago? I'm not opposed to kickstarter. I'm opposed to being tricked into a kickstarter.I think he's insinuating that Fallen Enchantress will be as big of failure as the original and because of that they will have to find a new scapegoat
The War of Magic game won't be finished until Fallen Enchantress is released which is what War of Magic should have been.
I don't see jack shit about Wardell or anyone else having to come up with marketing materials leading to an insufficent QA process or a "catastrophic poor judgement in not objectively evaluating the core game components", and those posts were written in September 2010.Wikipedia article said:
Can't say the reason for that. Maybe he didn't want to raise a big stink about a former employee because it makes him look like an asshole?
She forced his hand here by suing him.
This right here is the most likely scenario.
So it's her fault he's filing a frivilous lawsuit?
Yes, absolutely. It's a countersuit and it's not frivolous assuming she really did actually destroy all of the data on her way out the door. The amount may be high but as a few people have said, you shoot for the moon and let the court decide an appropriate amount if you're going to sue someone.
Stardock showed no inclination to sue her or otherwise cast blame on her until she sued Wardell.
Except she won her case, meaning her grievance had merit. It was a personal case against Wardell and now you're saying it's ok for him to use Stardock as a means to get back at her. A different party suing her means it can't be a proper countersuit. And blaming Elemental's performance on the destruction of marketing materials is definitely frivolous.
She won the appeal. We have no details of the case or outcome. We don't even know what was being appealed.
As for the merit of the case, we'll have to wait and see what the court says!
It smells, not reading her suit because it's not available online, that there was a compensation dispute and she kept the laptop/deleted her work under the impression that she wasn't getting paid and could at least make some of it up in kind and keep her work until he coughed up.
The courts siding with her in unspecified portions of her suit and my own personal experience both point to her being right.
The courts siding with her in unspecified portions of her suit and my own personal experience both point to her being right.
Why would she sue him personally for a compensation dispute?
I've had clients who have wanted extra work done on "their own" dime, paid down payment on the project, then laughed in my face when it came completion time and told me they'd fire me from the day job portion if I put up a fight. Small business owners are dicks.
Zuhzuhzombie!!
Member
They could have delayed the game three weeks.
Ahahahahahahahaha.
Arrowgigantic
Member
http://kotaku.com/5940401/pc-gaming...after-she-sued-the-boss-for-sexual-harassment
Read that court document, HOLY SHIT.
Read that court document, HOLY SHIT.
Okay if this doesn't cause more outrage than that idiotic "girlfriend mode" controversy then I weep for this world.
Weeeeelp. I hope her purity test score comes out in court documents though maybe you'll finally get your answer, Brad!