I have a Stormgate question as it pertains to being a fan of Reforged and Blizzard intellectual properties:
If Activision Blizzard takes legal action against Stormgate for stealing Blizzard intellectual properties such as Marines or the feel of Warcraft/Starcraft, and if Activision Blizzard should win in such a case and crush Stormgate, wouldn’t that be exceedingly demoralizing for fans of this genre?
It almost feels like we are poised to have a social media explosion that turns off even more people to the genre, simply on the whim of Activision. And when I think about playing a non-Activision RTS, avoiding getting screwed by Activision would have seemingly been one of my goals.
As an example, I made a self parody post in 2022 about what if Activision took legal action against my open source Java-based emulator of Warcraft 3, and although I removed the parody within 48 hours when misquotes of what I said that took it as truth started popping up everywhere… At some point, I think the majority of people were not able to discern the parody from the reality. And the U.S. laws are actually generally based on a “jury of your peers” in the worst case. So, what I’m saying is that my peers can’t discern between whether an RTS emulator that follows the rules (or at least any rules I know of) and avoids offering downloads for Blizzard assets – instead only allowing download of the emulator code itself – even then when it follows the rules, people are fairly ignorant of the difference. They don’t care. Believing Activision took legal action against something supports their narrative of frustration with Activision so often they probably wouldn’t even question it.
Because so many people easily accept Activision taking actions against something they won’t win like that, maybe their simple faith in what isn’t true actually makes Activision win. And that would mean Activision could probably win against Stormgate, too, even if ideologists and thinkers find themselves on Stormgate’s side.
So, how do we win? What is the pathway to good RTS in the future? Is Stormgate ready to have the social medium use it as a tool to further disenfranchise RTS players? If not, how will it avoid this fate?