So in doing some research on NC Soft last evening I ran across several articles involving a lawsuit by NC Soft against En Masse/Blue Hole. Apparently this company was started by formedr NC Soft employees and they have created a game called Tera (which looks kind of cool btw). Well NC Soft is claiming that En Masse/Blue Hole stole their intellectual property etc as Tera greatly resembles an old NC Game. My questions are:
1. Has anyone reached out to En Masse/Blue Hole in regards to saving COH?
2. Do we think this lawsuit has any bearing on the closure of COH?
3. Do we think the fact that NC Soft is suing this company has any relevance (good or bad) on our cause? I was thinking that perhaps they do not want to have to sue any other entities and therefore may be more willing to negotiate and sell rather than face this same situation again with COH. Or alternatively they may feel that since they have the ability to sue keep hold of the IP and not negotiate they would go this way.
Thoughts? I apologive if this has been posted elsewhere but I have not seen any mention of the lawsuit in any other posts.
I doubt they'll be able to help, TERA isn't doing all that great either - I saw an article of how they merged all the servers and are now down to just three (an RP, PvE & PvP).
Gotcha about the game. Still wondering what implications this has if any on our efforts
I don't think there's much relevance here....
The case is about Blue Hole Studios hiring former NCsoft employees who used code stolen from a prior incarnation of Lineage 3 in Tera.
Criminal charges against those employees were filed, and they were found guilty.
NCsoft sued Bluehole and won in court.
En Masse, the US development company for Tera, settled thier suit with NCsoft.
Now, I'm not making a judgement on the merits of the case, but I can't imagine that NCsoft would look kindly on an alliance between the SaveCoH folks and Bluehole or En Masse.
No definitely not had not read that it was settled. The 2 articles i read showed it still in process and En Masse arguing that they had done nothing wrong but create a game. I did not know there was a true theft portion and not just that they had created a game similar ro a NC game thanks for the clarification and i feel better that it does not have any bearing on our efforts. Though I was hoping they would feel selling and or working with someone to save the game would be a better business path than looking at another company creating a similar game and going down this same path. But now I see they are very different situations. Again thanks