Dungeon Defender Studio Enters Legal Battle with Ark Developer

Now, while all the focus of the legal gaming world has shifted to Digital Homicide's recent lawsuit against beloved figure Jim MotherEffin’ Stirling for a whooping 10 million dollar suit--a lawsuit that won’t go anywhere, by the way, that much should be abundantly obvious--another gaming focused lawsuit has tried to sneak past us. Unfortunately, we’re too keen to let something like this slip by--and by “we” I mean Kotaku--and now, we’ve been told that Ark: Survival developer Studio Wildcard is being sued for an undisclosed amount of money by Dungeon Defender developer Trendy over a man called Jeremy Stieglitz.

Jeremy Stieglitz was a former employee at Trendy, who quit and went on to work with Wildcard on the development or Ark: Survival. Trendy accuses him not only of breaching his contract by trying to poach developers currently working for them, they also accuse him of stealing ideas they had been working on to make Ark: Survival. Wildcard, of course, denies these accusations, and says that he was only working with them as a consultant, but would be hired full-time later.

They also added this:

"Trendy's Complaint reads more like a salacious tabloid story than a short and plain statement of the ultimate facts allegedly showing Trendy's entitlement to relief, as required by the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure. Many of the allegations are disparaging and included simply to be provocative. They are irrelevant, immaterial, impertinent, and scandalous. As such, these allegations should be stricken."

On April 27th, the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida will hear a case by Trendy for a recently submitted motion for an injection--which, if they rule in favor of, would halt development of Ark and could even pull the game from Steam. In the meantime, though, we’ll just have to sit on our hands and wait--there’s a whole lot we don’t know about where this is going, or who to ‘root’ for.

Normally, it'd be pretty easy. Trendy games has a history of being a terrible company to work for, an their game is full of microtransactions and DLC and other such crap. That said, a huge reason the company was so terrible was because of the manager, who was none other than Jeremy Stieglitz himself, the man responsible for this whole mess.  It's possible that things had improved since his departure, and now WildCard is in the crapper?  Either way, it's Trendy who's starting the lawsuit, and i admit, after everything I've heard about Jeremy, I wouldn't be surprised if the allegations were true. 

But then, he could have had a change of heart.  We shouldn't judge without data.

So, things are certainly going to prove interesting as they develop... let's see where they go.