Stardock Sues Ex-Employee For One Million

[radio667]

from bluesnews.com ........... PDFcast has word that Stardock is suing Alexandra Miseta for one million dollars, accusing their former marketing manager of deleting the company's analytics and marketing data before she left the company without notice a few weeks before the release of Elemental: War of Magic, going so far as to say this exacerbated the issues they had to deal with relating to the game's initial problems.

Polygon summarizes the situation:

The case alleges that Miseta deleted, destroyed and/or stole Stardock's Elemental materials, analytics, and trade show information just before quitting, causing the company to lose all their marketing data and analytics for Elemental: War of Magic only three weeks before the game's scheduled launch.

Stardock claims that it was forced to spend more than $5000 assessing the damaged caused by Miseta's actions and attempting to restore the Elemental materials, analytics, and trade show information, and that the interruption in availablility of this data caused Stardock to lose more than $1 million in profits.

Stardock says in its filing that the loss of the materials led to a detraction from programming, debugging, and other responsibilities, and Elemental was subsequently unsuccessful in the marketplace, "earning a fraction of its anticipated profits and causing [Stardock] damages of over $1,000,000".

In addition to this, Stardock claims that Miseta did not return the company laptop she had been using, and had in fact been running side businesses during work hours using the company laptop.

Stardock Corporation

[SkaarjMaster]

50 lashes with a wet noodle!!!

[maxdamage]

Originally Posted by SkaarjMaster

50 lashes with a wet noodle!!!

Is that before or after she has to sit in the dock?

[blito3]

50 noodles with wet lashes

[SkaarjMaster]

50 lashes with my wet noodle
(aw, c'mon, you know someone had to say it eventually)

[blito3]

eventually......eventually...

[Creeper]

In apparently unrelated news, they had no backups? They should sue their IT dept.

[Dr.Flay]

Sounds like a scapegoat to me (never met someone who didn't try to blag a laptop before they quit a company).
No backups.
The management are not in control or do not understand, and I bet even if they did, they would probably leave them on-site.

If the programmers know their job, they could make a good game that sells without analytics and marketing data.
Good ideas and skills make a good game, but marketing and analytics can sell a crap game by the bucket-load.

A great game will sell like a great beer.
We are all still drinking from the cup of UT over 10 years later.

How much analysis and marketing does it take to make you buy and play UT ?

Never knew why Stardock thought they could jump from making GUIs and themes to making games.
It's just like when Symantec decided to become an antivirus company.
Great disk-tools for geeks and admins thrown out in favour of a slow, bulky and crap AV that makes them huge amounts of $.
I miss Norton Commander.