Jack Coleman (He/Him) is a News Editor from Ireland. This is his third full year in games media, having previously worked freelance for various outlets, including DualShockers and NME.
Previously, he’s interviewed breakout indie developers, broken big news stories, reviewed massive releases and recounted his time living as a humble woodsman in Oblivion.
A lifelong gamer, Jack is primarily interested in RPGs and narrative experiences. He’s also been playing League of Legends for a decade, unfortunately.
If you cast your mind back two-and-a-half years ago to the long-forgotten year of 2022, you may recall the hullabaloo surrounding the Nintendo Switch port of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 (KOTOR 2) from developer Aspyr Media.
An announcement trailer for the port teased that an expansion created using the fan-made Restored Content Mod would release sometime after the game’s release. However, this expansion never panned out because of a conflict with the current intellectual property rights holder, Disney.
Duel of the Litigators
This led self-proclaimed gamer Malachi Mickelonis and others to file a class-action lawsuit against Aspyr Media for “completely duping” the community by failing to deliver on the expansion.
The ensuing legal case was a flurry of desperate legal sparring, which included Mickelonis’ legal representative, Ray Kim, using Lil Wayne lyrics to portray Aspyr as “goons” and his clients as “goblins,” while Aspyr tried to argue that no one was even aware of the planned expansion because most people skip YouTube videos after the first five seconds. Aspyr also claimed that the expansion had “no economic value” because it was based on free content and would have been available for free.
An interesting part of the whole affair involved Aspyr trying to get documents partially redacted because, in the studio’s eyes, they constituted trade secrets such as “the identities of the right persons to work with at Lucasfilm to secure access to Lucasfilm intellectual property.” The court was amenable to these redactions, accepting Aspyr’s argument that the revelation of these figures would cause the studio “lasting business harm.”
After the court deemed the case suitable for trial, Aspyr ultimately settled with the “gamers” regarding the missing expansion. A separate case contested between the same group of gamers and Disney was also settled out of court.
The best way to play KOTOR 2 is finally available on Switch, but only if you know how to mod on the console.
As for Knights of the Old Republic, the long-suffering remake of the original has been moved from Aspyr Media to Mad Head Games, who is currently working on the project. A remake of the second game is “on the road map” according to a Lucasfilm Games executive, but fans are wary of any vague promises because of the trouble the original remake has faced.
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A new game set during the Old Republic era was announced at The Game Awards — Fate of the Old Republic is in development at Arcanaut Studios and is being directed by Casey Hudson.
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