First of all, in legal matters "opinion" can mean a lawyer's argument, not just "something I think is true." It's likely they have consulted lawyers before making these posts. They've maintained for decades that they own Star Control besides the name and (possibly parts of) SC3. Even if they are mistaken, I do believe that perception came from somewhere and they had legal reasons for believing it.

Look, I don't have anything against Stardock. I don't have much past experience with them (positive or negative) and I'm a lower-tier founder for Origins. I want both games to succeed and hope this will be worked out peacefully. But Wardell is neither a lawyer nor an unbiased source - I'm not saying he's lying, but he is as much a party in this case as F&P. And we haven't seen Stardock's legal documents either.

I think it's more likely that F&P sincerely believe they have legal arguments in their favor than that they are making stuff up. Now, perhaps they are wrong or it is more complicated than they think, as IP matters often are. But, unless we see other reasons to think they've completely lost their minds after Skylanders' success, I will believe for now that both sides are acting in good faith that they have at least a prima facie legal case. (Though I don't think F&P should have gone public with this dispute).

My guess is they're talking companies that come along and milk dead franchises started by other developers.
Klumpen0815's examples are specifically ones that have been long dead and then revived by other developers.
Mario, Zelda and Final Fantasy were never died, nor are they now being made by different developers.
This.

Whatever. Keep repeating yourself. Like I said. The game is "back", never left and has Stardock's name on it as publisher which means GoG has good reason to believe Stardock's claim.

I read between the lines as a few others have, and it looks like we were correct and you weren't. There were plenty of signs that F&P's claims were fishy...

Sounds to me like you're repeating yourself. I already said I was leaning towards Stardock.

I'd never try to tell you that you don't know about making games, but my recollection as a player of games is that a whole lot of the bad reviews didn't really hammer memory management or bugs. They mentioned crashes and bugs, yes, but right alongside things like club-wielding peasants one-shotting dragons, bland landscapes, and a release AI that was not up to your high GalCiv standards. And all of those things were discussed in detail on your forum before release.

Your Star Control game looks lovely, so blandness is no danger, but with Elemental you kept telling us "Guys, you don't have the whole game, I do, trust me, Elemental is great" and it was not - not on release at least. I'm only hoping that you've listened to your beta testers more closely this time. And hoping you got a good set of them =)

While I agree to an extent that Beamdog milks the Infinity Engine games a bit too much - Stardock for the most part hasn't done this. It's not like they're throwing a coat of paint onto Star Control and calling it a day. They're using the old IP to create a brand new game. Furthermore Star Control is the only old IP they are using that wasn't originally theirs to begin with - all of their other games are original IPs. Saying Stardock isn't able to make anything of value of their own is a big stretch.

[EDIT] I guess I'm saying I don't think they deserve to be put in the same boat as Beamdog. While Stardock has its issues (DLC much?), they're far and above better than Beamdog.

To be fair, Elemental, while it was their own IP, was made as a spiritual successor to Masters of Magic. In fact during development it was constantly referred to as "The Not-MoM game". But they did do their own thing with it, it wasn't just a coat of paint and polish. In fact I'd love to see them do a new game with an evolution of the design and on their new engines.

So the classic Star Control games are still being sold on GOG and are accessible via direct links. However, they do not appear on search. They don't even appear under Stardock if you go to their publisher page on GOG.

GOG, could you please clarify what is going on?

inb4 "It's a bug, we'll look into that."

So long Star Control 2.. The only old game I wasn't compelled to buy before being removed from gog because of the better free (legal) open source version.. :\

Long live The Ur-Quan Masters! :D

So i guess they got removed??? Cheers

Now the pages are no longer available at all. Either someone at GOG didn't get the memo that they were staying, or the legal issues weren't worked out to GOG's satisfaction (despite Mr. Wardell's optimistic assurances).

Really?

Plot twist!

With Ur-Quan Master being freeware and all, this fight over the right to publish the DOS version seems a bit childish. And complaining about having your name mentioned in a diagram on a web page ... seriously?

But okay, I too get a bit grumpy this time of year.