Why not "Stardock's plan to give you cancer?"  Clearly these fellas need to do a little more research and think of an appropriate title. 

I don't have any issues with Elemental. I Pre-Ordered it and enjoyed it from the start. It had a few issues (Like Crashing) and the AI needed some work, but the game was always fun. It's current rev. is a good game. 18 years ago I was going through the same issues with "Master of Magic", The AI was terrible, it kept crashing, and patches needed to be ordered by mail, but the game was ambitious and fun. I look forward to FE and thank the developers for tackling this difficult genre.

The discussions should remain separated. I may have a few issues still with the game (in its current state at least) but what Stardock is doing on a commercial level is glorious and players should talk about it. Seriously, just take a look around. More and more developers are going the opposite road, releasing blatantly unfinished games, with less and less content and less and less value, and they seem all pretty "casual" about that.

They spend more effort trying to prevent you from buying an used game than they do trying to make a game that is WORTH paying full price for.

Stardock dropped the ball heavily with WoM but when FE is released they'll have piled TWO YEARS of additional development with no additional charge for first buyers. I'm pretty sure this is unprecedented stuff.

This.

Lets look at other companies reputations and what they do with it. hE who should not be nAmed ruins their reputation.. so what do they do to fix it? They buy out a studio who has a good rep with people.. and rename all their studios after it. Not long after said purchase.. the studio that once was worshiped is quickly losing its consumer goodwill and will continue to.. not necessarily in direct relation to the actual developers actions but most likely constraints put on them by the now parent Publisher.

Or lets look at steam.. (Disclosure: I can't stand steam but thats not the point here)

Part of the reason Steam is what it is , is that a lot of people have enormous goodwill toward valve. A great example is that origin is no different really than steam as far as the TOS and EULA. Yet many people who willingly accepted Valves conditions are much less likely to accept origins due to the consumer view on the company who runs it. Now personally neither company has enough of my trust for me to agree to the crazy TOS. But many people feel that Valve is a good guy.. while those who run origin are not. So one can pretty much expect that while Origin may do okay.. it certainly has no chance of competing with steam in the long term. Less because of the actual service and more because of consumers general sentiment toward each services parent company.

Stardock spent alot of its goodwill in the Sale of Impulse and the release of EWOM. It certainly needed to do something to bolster consumer sentiment given that smaller companies live and die on it. While large companies can afford to give consumers the middle finger and continually do, that particular attitude serves to accentuate any consumer centric move by any company in the industry. I mean lets be honest here.. if stardock was owned by hE who should not be nAmed we woulda had 5 or 10 DLC packs for E:WOM and then it would have been buried or the patches would have been sold as Expansions given the amount of core changes there were in them, the devs split up and sent to other studios and/or fired and stardock would be renamed Bioware Michigan.

TLDR: The gaming industry is going in a direction that alienates consumers and any move opposite of that accentuates a difference between stardock and larger companies.

Agreed entirely.

It feels to me like the big guys (and EA are a prime example) are trying so hard to squeeze profits out at all costs, with short release cycles and incessant DLC amongst other things, that they are continually causing long term damage to their company image and reputation which ultimately DOES have an effect on sales, even if it isn't enough to drive them out of business (so far anyway - hard to know the future).

Stardock haven't always got it right, in fact with WoM my feeling was they got it about as seriously wrong as they could have (for Stardock - perhaps an EA could have done even worse ) but the underlying feeling is that they do really care about the relationship with the customer.

Me too.  I was fully aware that there were issues at the time that I bought it.  I have absolutely no regrets.

This.  The assumption is based (so I've been told by one developer, who may nor may not be correct) on a political model: You can damage your brand as much as you like, as long as you have a emotional button to use on those who've bought into your product.  In game marketing terms, you can run a brand into the ground, or issue products under the brand that have nothing to do with the original, as long as you can convince your audience they have nowhere else to go.  However, you always run the risk of alienating players completely, just as EA's founder, Trip Hawkins, did when he bought and ran New World Computing's intellectual assets into the ground, thinking a cash cow would produce indefinitely for his 3DO outfit even after it's been completely abused.  He was wrong.

It seems to me (and for what little my opinion's worth) that the tack being employed by Stardock portraying FE as a "WoM remade correctly" will really bear fruit with its niche audience and at least a few better game site writers.  Where memory exists, you show you won't break faith.  In a broader general market, with a lot of fly-buy purchasers, this wouldn't really matter anywhere near as much, not when the audience follows the latest, greatest PR.  But Stardock's arguably not aiming its games at that group, and I think their choices in this respect are correct.  FE will sell based on its own merit, but it will also reinforce the argument that  they're not above repairing what they acknowledge to be flaws in an earlier release.

I have said before that most games these days are a 3 chapter book with each other chapter sold separately, and self destructs if you ever don't agree to new terms no matter what - the book just burns itself to ashes in your hands.  Also, the book knows when you read it, how often you read it, and reports to the author every activity you do, it follows you around and gets angry when you read other books.  Orwellian policies are common, and requiring constant internet renders a game unplayable in bad weather situations, or for many other reasons i might not have internet.

The one thing i hold against Stardock is requiring constant internet connection, knowing if my net ever fails me or if i am without it, this product becomes unusable immediately.  I find it disturbing, actually.

However, i am glad Stardock is affiliating FE with WOM because everyone on the internet will figure out the relation within one google search anyway, so hiding from the past doesn't work.  Instead they are admitting a fatally bad release, which is very uncommon in this industry - ethical practices are rare these days, and by this association they gain the credibility of standing by "what they did" rather than "standing behind our successes, ignoring our failures".

This method, i believe will help garner brand loyalty - and it didn't hurt to bring in Derek Paxton from FFH - that correlation alone for example, was enough to get me in.

This is typical of Stardock, but only during beta periods. Once the game goes live, that restriction is removed.

Like Galactic Civilizations, Fallen Enchantress won't have any copy protection whatsoever on release.

All we'll have is a serial number so that it can get tied to your account so that you can re-download it from us anywhere any time.

oh cool, so there IS a game company with ethics, nice to know!  After some test driving, i have a lot to learn - i suck pretty bad.  however it's a good thing and not a bad thing, as a first day newb, i SHOULD suck bad.