Saw this thing today, so I figured I'd post a thread about it. It deserves awareness, really. Like many gamers on this site I sympathize a lot with indie developers. Indie games are usually where you find new ideas and the creativity the AA companies lack.

The new Star Trek show has completely stolen plot points, lore, characters and even scenes from an indie adventure game. Had it been one or two things, you could chalk it up as coincidence, sure. But this is pretty much the whole thing.

Feel free to spread the news. This is just wrong.

http://anas-tronaut.blogspot.no/2017/10/star-trek-discovery-tardigrades.html

The dev needs to retain a copyright lawyer sooner rather than later. Wait too long and they'll find themselves on the end of a copyright takedown strike despite coming up with the idea first - because copyright law is so utterly fucked up.

Yeah the dev needs to act quickly.

I asked about it on the show's official Facebook page. My comment got deleted in less than a minute.

Okay, usually I'm skeptical about these "the big bad company ripped off my ideas" claims. But this one looks pretty legit. Far too many parallels to be coincidental., IMO.

Getting into a protracted legal battle with a major Hollywood studio is probably not a particularly smart move for an indie developer to make. Even if he wins the first court case, they will file an appeal. They will appeal until he runs out of money for legal funds. Which he will, sooner rather than later, and they won't. It's as simple as that.

That aside, I've seen neither the show nor played the game, but judging from this blog post, both parties seem to try really hard to earn those progressive brownie points. There's only so many ways to cram minority stereotypes in your game/show, so there's bound to be some overlap.

I think this could easily be a genuine coincidence. But it's equally likely that Start Trek wanted to explore the idea of using tardigrades and then stumbled upon this indie game while researching it. Star Trek's tardigrades don't look like the indie game's though, they just both look like actual Tardigrades.
Plus, the character resemblance argument is nonsense. They are all cliches at this point.

Depends on how strong the case is. Some lawyers are willing to only get paid if they win and only do so on cases where their chance of winning is very high. This might be such a case. If this case gets a lot of publicity then the chance of finding such a lawyer becomes much higher as well. Just because you have unlimited funds doesn't mean you'll win in court.

the character resemblance is a fair point in this case. Those + everything else ripped off from the game is part of the same mix. Too many similarities here for it to be a coincidence.

This is a rip off.They even copied scenes from the game.

Dude, did you read the blog post? It says right there "some of the characters resemble a lot of common traits between the show and the game", because *gasp* apparently including token black heroines and token homosexual couples should give you a monopoly on including said stereotypes in your work.

And as for copying story ideas, lol, Deep Space Nine is literally a carbon copy of a Babylon 5 treatment J. Michael Straczynski sent to Paramount in the late 80s. It's not like Star Trek is a stranger to blatantly ripping off other people's ideas.

Yes, I've read it. The point about the characters obviously only becomes relevant in context of the more unique elements that both titles share, as after that link is established other similarities also become suspect.

Also, I'm tired of people whining about the woes of seeing a black protagonist, so I'm mocking you.

You're not in the position to mock anyone, Mr "Dr Who is ruined forever because they cast a chick in the title role".

Yes, I am, because as I explained at length my problem with that has nothing to do with "tokens", feminism, political correctness or any of that. It's analogous to, for example, the stupidly altered Klingons from Discovery, not to the gender or skin color of it's protagonist, who is a new character and can be any color, gender and sexual orientation.

So because other Star Trek writers have ripped off things in the past, it suddenly makes it ok for other writers to do the same? Ok.....

What really surprises me is that I've seen no website pick up the story. I thought something like Den of Geek or some other sci-fi focused site would notice and deem it worth reporting.