King vs The Banner Saga Legal Dispute Interview

Eurogamer has also chatted with Stoic’s team about their legal dispute with King, and offers some interesting details on how the story developed. Here’s a snippet:

“We were looking at it and Forbes was writing articles on it,” Jorgensen says. “MSNBC is running a whole freaking page thing on The Banner Saga, and we’re going, wow.”

“There’s a housekeeper who cleans my house occasionally,” says Watson. “She came in one morning while I was getting ready to go to work. She said, I saw your game mentioned on MSNBC this morning on TV. I was like, what? Why? I knew why, but it was like, my god!”

“For a year-and-a-half, we hang out with my neighbours,” Jorgensen adds. “We talk. What do you do? He has this business and I have mine. I’m a video game designer and I have a game called The Banner Saga. Okay, great, whatever. We never talk about business really. Then one day he comes over and he’s like, dude, I didn’t know you guys had a big game! I saw it on MSNBC! You’re getting sued! You have a cool game!”

King, as the professional publicists call it, was suffering a PR nightmare. Here we had a the huge, evil corporation doing evil work, and trying to stamp over the small and defenceless in the process. And all this ahead of King’s crucial IPO. The pressure applied by the internet and news anchors forced its hand. The kicking had to stop.

And so King called Stoic.

“They expressed interest in making it go away,” Watson says, smirking.

“When I spoke to them they were very conciliatory and polite and apologetic. I don’t know how much of that was legitimate and how much of that was trying to charm me. But for them, they were trying to assemble an IPO and have all of their house in order for their initial public offering. The stock market is of course driven entirely by psychology, and the last thing you need is a bunch of negative press when you’re trying to use Jedi mind tricks to get people to buy your stock and making shareholders rich.”