Dogan and Kazon speak:
https://www.dogarandkazon.com/blog/2019/1/2/injunction-junction-court-instruction

Unfortunately I think this hurts the fans, but I understand that it's (probably) intended to give F&P the upper hand in negotiations going forward.

I'm not sure that I'd really agree that it hurts the fans that much, with the exception of possibly planned DLC not being released.

I would think that the game has been out long enough at this point that the majority of fans who intended to purchase the game have likely already done so if the sales trends follow traditional patterns wherein the majority of purchases are made in the initial week or two after a game's release.

I doubt I'm the only person who doesn't buy games on release. Some people may prefer to wait until the game goes on sale, for example.

Ahhh, I see... so not really something significant from SCO, then.

More importantly... separate Safe Ones and Spathi Captain tracks I can understand, but why on earth does Fwiffo need his own track? You only talk to him once!

In fact I feel similarly about pretty much all the extra tracks... but I guess it can't hurt, at least.

SCO features? What are you talking about?

If we had done a linear extrapolation, the result would've been much more massive than what SC2's systems show us.

Sure, but you cannot necessarily (or at least shouldn't) do a linear extrapolation from a single sample.....

On the other hand, given a single sample, it's more likely that it's typical or at least common, rather than rare or unique. You can't derive from that what a typical star system would look like, but you can conclude that other star systems likely include planets.

Now I should caveat that I'm a very infrequent contributor here to this community so maybe there's some policy that I'm unaware of that specifies that Origins is not germane to the general discussion board. But it does seem like more people are interested in the discussion of this lawsuit than an actual new Star Control game.

It was decided that SC:O discussion belongs in the Starbase Cafe section. There are two or three threads about it there, but they haven't seen any posts for a week or two.

I don't like that the ZFP uses placeholder alien portraits. I don't like the idea of using placeholder alien portraits at all.

It seems entirely possible to me that that portrait was always intended to be ZFP and was just used as a placeholder for other aliens because every alien needs a portrait for things to work properly.

Rather than calling the GOTP announcement timing suspicious, I think it was just an unfortunate coincidence – the announcement was timed to coincide with some anniversary of the game's release or something, after all, and it was just unfortunate that that came close to impinging on SCO, which also had plans timed to coincide with the anniversary.

To be fair, words often have multiple meanings, so you might be thinking of a particular meaning while forgetting there's another meaning that's quite insulting. For example, Wiktionary lists one meaning of obtuse as "indirect, circuitous".

It's possible that GoG packages the installer for them, but there's literally no reason why they couldn't package an installer themselves if the game is removed from GoG and Steam. If they have DLCs, that might complicate things though; it could be that some significant amount of work would be needed to produce a version they could sell on their own website. Still... it's definitely possible.

I'd say they would've done better to call their currency StarBucks after SC1; Krulle's point about RU makes a lot of sense to me. Though as Zanthius says, it shows more imagination to suppose that perhaps not aliens accept the same currencies; but still, if there must be a universal currency, it makes more sense for it to be a fiat currency (eg coins) rather than a credit account. RU is definitely not a fiat currency in SC2; it's basically a form of credit account. "Since you brought me this much resources, I own you this much in return."

I probably won't buy SCO either. I might've gotten it in on sale two or three years after the release, but everything I've seen about the lawsuit and Stardock has convinced me that, even if it turns out to be a pretty good game, it's not a company I want to give a single cent to.

It can probably recognize it by the gzip header (ie, the first few bytes of the file).

(Or I guess the zip header in this case.)

It's possible to get a Mac to recognize it too (I've done it for Blades of Exile), but it requires a little work on the programmer's part (some plist entries), which I imagine they might not have done in UQM.

“Information brokers”? I’m sorry but have you played the game? If you had you’d know that is not their role. They’re spies. They don’t sell information. 

That's really splitting hairs, to be honest. The difference between spies and information brokers is fairly slim.

But yeah, sure. A question for a jury or whatever.

The similarity to the Melnorme is obvious to anyone who's played the game. Whether it's similar enough to be an infringement is not clear, sure. But there are very clear similarities that I'm sure would be taken into account when trying to determine whether it is, in fact, an infringment:

• They are orange and bulbous.
• They have the same name (while it's not outright stated, it's very strongly implied that the Mael-Num and the Melnorme are the same race). And no, I'm sure a missing hyphen won't make a difference.
• They are information brokers.

You're drawing attention to all the differences, but as far as I can tell that's really just a diversion. The differences aren't what matter here, are they? What matters is the similarities. Are there enough similarities to constitute a copyright infringement? Who knows. But there are definitely some pretty substantial similarities.

I guess I can agree that filing a DMCA for SCO itself was maybe going to far, but the case is not so clear with the content packs, which are very close to infringing on their copyrights (whether or not they are infringing is for a lawyer or judge or whatever to decide).

or have Stardock be the publisher and not even need to worry about paying for the TM.

At this point, if Stardock were the publisher of Ghosts of the Precursors, I'd seriously reconsider whether I actually want to buy even that game.