It’s Worse Than That, He’s Dead Jim

Posted by Stropp on December 13, 2007

Things aren’t looking bright and rosy for Star Trek Online and Perpetual Entertainment.

It’s only been a month or two since Perpetual announced that their, at that stage, soon to be released MMO, Gods and Heroes was going into an indefinite hold. Everyone read between the lines and realised that Gods and Heroes was in fact being cancelled. Around about the same time there was an announcement of layoffs and transfers to the Star Trek Online team.

Turmoil like this doesn’t really bode well for a company. Even if a company is in good financial health and the projects are doing well, layoffs and cancellations have an effect. The  least of which is that the remaining employees polish up their resumes, and start looking around.

Unfortunately it doesn’t really look like Perpetual is in good financial health.

Ten Ton Hammer recently broke the news that Perpetual Entertainment is being sued for fraud and breach of contract following the Gods and Heroes cancellation.

It appears that Perpetual did the dirty on a company called Kohnke by breach of contract, fraudulent transfer of holdings such as the Star Trek Online licence so that when it liquidated its assets, the other creditors wouldn’t recieve their share. All up there are seven counts of business misconduct.

All up things aren’t looking to good for Perpetual. If the suit has merit, it’s likely Perpetual will be required to cough up the STO licence and probably a whole bunch of money. A case like this may even drag on for years, and the first thing the plaintifs are likely to do is to put a freeze on any activity to do with the licence. Of course, I’m Not A Lawyer, so this is just speculation, but I expect that Star Trek Online will be the next in the MMORPG deadpool.

In the famous words of Dr McCoy.

It’s worse than that, he’s dead Jim.

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