Incident regarding WW1:CE

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EsgibtkeinBier
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Incident regarding WW1:CE

Post by EsgibtkeinBier »

Recently I became aware of the following discussion in the Steam forums:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/297090/di ... 661528373/

There, a very serious accusation was made against Slitherine regarding the fact that a world war one game called World War 1: Centennial Edition (developed by a small indie company) was removed from Steam because of a so-called unjustified and legally unfounded rights claim in order to eliminate competition. No one can reach a verdict without hearing both sides but I doubt that people start making such accusations unjustifiably.

WW1 CE developers posted the following that pretty much sum up the story from their perspective:
I was informed this morning that some UK company is contesting our property. As a consequence, waiting for news from our lawyers, Steam has temporarily removed the game from selling (but it is still supported and should be playable here).
The action is legally unfounded, as we do own the IP on this game. We'll follow up on that and see what happens.
The action is abusive and we shall contest it.

~~

We are basically in a legal limbo where the company contesting (trolling) our rights doesn't want to even discuss the legal basis of the case and Steam is awaiting for a common position between the parties. So it's gridlocked.
We are facing a situation where we have all the legal documents demonstrating clearly our rights but we would need to shelve a lot of money in legal fees to have it recognized legally in court to satisfy Steam requirements. At this stage, we prefer to invest this kind of money and energy in our new upcoming products that hopefully you will love.
Fortunately the game is available again on other portals who are more used to this kind of blackmail and of obnoxious "starve and kill everyone hunting on my territory" behaviour.

~~

Well it's quite simple... we need a court order to force them to let us sell (and support) the game here and they have the money to make the case last forever while we don t. We have a clear cut legal read of the contracts but it only works if you can say that in front of a judge... and to go there it costs a lot of money...
~~

That will be at least 5 grands to start the process and more if they want to make it delay, which they will.
To put it in perspective they never even wanted to sit down and discuss the contracts with us... they simply sent threat letters to everyone that were never substantiated and never ever answered our arguments or our demand for substantiation of claims.
When you deal with people like that who on top of it havea lot of money, you know that you re going through a dirty nasty battle that will be make you lose energy and money... and for the sole hope to be able to get the game back on steam in 2 years...

~~

To give you an idea, they approached us to "be our publisher" after the game was released asking for 50% of the revenue and all their costs covered, which we obviously refused and this is when the legal threats were launched. All they wanted is to make enough noise to take the game off Steam so that it does not compete with the release of their own product and they were successful. Steam is too big to have the energy or time to enter into this kind of dispute (and frankly I can understand them) and they asked both parties to come back to them with a common position, which "they" (the UK studio) never even wanted to consider (or even meet to exchange on the respective positions of the parties).
I will stop there because I'm quite bitter but I will never buy any of their games anymore and will warn any studio that comes close to them to avoid them at ALL cost. Some money is not worth partnering with this kind of people. Since then we've done our DD and we got mulitple example of these guys' behaviour and trust me it is vulture-like. So we were not the first and probably not the last.

~~
I would definitely want to hear what Slitherine has to say on the matter. Even if those guys are totaly wrong, not making any comments only worsens Slitherines position, at least in my eyes...
Last edited by EsgibtkeinBier on Fri May 08, 2015 11:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
BiteNibbleChomp
Lieutenant-General - Do 217E
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Re: Incident regarding WW1:CE

Post by BiteNibbleChomp »

I really hope this ends well for both sides - the world has enough problems as it is :(

- BNC
Ryan O'Shea - Developer - Strategic Command American Civil War
jdm
Slitherine
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Re: Incident regarding WW1:CE

Post by jdm »

It is true that there is an issue with WW1 Centennial Edition that relates to disputed ownership of aspects of the intellectual Property contained within this title. Unfortunately we cannot really go in to detail about the specifics, because this is an ongoing situation. What we can say is that when our IP, or one of our developers IP is threatened in this way, we will vigorously defend it to the full extent of the law. Sadly this is not an isolated case and over the past couple of years we have had to deal with no less than seven similar issues on behalf of our Developers, where threats, or theft of their IP have been the issues. Regretfully and for legal reasons we are unable to comment further on this matter.
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