(Shocking) News!!!!!

[Psyringe]

Hi David,

hey, I don't think we've seen "just tails" in this thread. Look at my post a while back, I explicitly mentioned the buyout by Silverstar and that that's a good thing for SFI. No one here has an interested to badmouth anyone - it's just that many people are deeply concerned about the future of the Space Empires series, because they love the work of you two. I think, based on SFI's history, these concerns have to be expected. After all, *if* something goes wrong in the end, is a small developer like Malfador really in a position to finance or occupy itself with lengthy lawsuits?

I'd really appreciate if SFI were a little more open about what caused their problems. The explanation that an outside developer milked 800.000$ from them comes as a total surprise to me, and at the moment I don't really see how this could have happened. I just don't see any developer involved who even was in a position to demand that much money from SFI. (SFI didn't have so many successful outside developers besides Stardock, and Stardock didn't do such a thing, they are the ones who didn't get paid). To be honest, to me the explanation that SFI's cash-monkey in-house development used up all this money to produce games that didn't nearly generate enough revenue, sounds much more likely. Also I wonder, if SFI's financial breakdown can be explained so easily by this so far rather mysterious third party, then why weren't the developers who waited (and are still waiting) for their royalties told about it? I'm not saying that it's impossible, but please understand, from my perspective the details as of now don't fit together very well.

Anyway, the decision to go with SFI has been made, and so we can't do anything else but keeping our fingers crossed that things will turn out the way you hope. And that's exactly what I'll do. Fortunately, there's no one making ridiculous announcements like "SFI are eeeevil, I won't buy anything from them", so even if people are skeptical about SFI's trustworthiness, this won't hurt sales.

I certainly will buy SEV, no matter who distributes it. What I heard about the game so far sounds great. I just hope that you and Aaron really get the money you deserve for your outstanding, dedicated work.