The strange case of the gamer’s lawsuit against Aspyr was resolved earlier this month. The suit, which saw a fan upset at the studio’s “false advertising” after DLC based on KOTOR 2’s Restored Content Mod failed to materialise as part of its Nintendo Switch port, culminated in a settlement between Aspyr and the gamers who brought the suit to bear.
The settlement put an end to a two-and-a-half year-long saga which as recently reported by Game File, took some wild twists and turns as it wended its way through court. At various stages, the suit witnessed accusations of demonic possession, lawyers throwing down Lil Wayne lyrics, and Aspyr desperately trying to conceal what it believes to be vital trade secrets.
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Aspyr, meanwhile, made several interesting arguments in defence of their position. Initially, the main point of its defence was that, when the DLC was cancelled, Asypr offered a free game as compensation for the DLCs, which it claimed nullified the accusation of false advertising. But this failed to sway the judge.
Aspyr’s lawyers then claimed the tease for the DLC couldn’t have been widely seen by viewers because it appeared at the end of a YouTube trailer, arguing that “many YouTube viewers skip [videos] after the first five seconds.” In April this year, meanwhile, Aspyr sourced expert testimony from Blizzard’s former production manager Frank Gilson, who testified that the promised DLC has “no economic value” because it was based on fan-made content and offered for free.
One of the most intriguing bits of the lawsuit also derived from those April filings. Here, Aspyr’s lawyers requested that several documents be redacted. These documents included “email chains” between Aspyr and Lucasfilm, which in Aspyr’s view “reveal[ed] a key trade secret; the identities of the right persons to work with at Lucasfilm to secure access to Lucasfilm intellectual property.”
Aspyr claimed it took “years, sometimes decades” to cultivate these relationships and that revealing them would cause the company “lasting business harm”. The court permitted the redactions.
The saga ended when the Judge determined that the case between Mickelonis and Aspyr, which at this point had diminished from a class-action lawsuit into a smaller case involving less than 20 gamers, could proceed to trial, at which point negotiations began for a settlement. A second case, this time between the gamers and Disney, who became involved in legal proceedings having blocked the Restored Content mod from being used in the DLC, was also settled out of court.
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