Given the partial corporate ownership, one does have to wonder about the "indie" label here.

They're independent of all kinds of things, like the Roman Empire.

so wait you want a company that stays independent... ie resists hostile takeover... however not with any legal shenanigans, that's not allowed.. indie companies should be expected to defend themselves... what with exactly? bows and arrows?

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to take any side and I don't know this case and I'm not a lawyer, but I think we are only hearing one side to this story and there are multiple important points to this story.

Firstly: @"former employers' technologies,"

If they are using an existing code base developed at Checkpoint, then yes, they are in violation of that IP. However, bosses often (conveniently) overlook the blindly obvious fact that every programmer they hire is only ever hired if they already know exactly how to write a games engine. Almost every games programmer I've ever meet has been a very highly talented person who can write any games engine given sufficient development time ... and they could do it all on their own, if given sufficient time.

As for the poaching of staff, that does sound bad. However to be fair to any staff member who leaves a company, they are obviously going to go to where they get the best deal. That is after all the very nature of business itself and for bosses to be successful in business, they are only to happy to seek the best deals for themselves, so its only fair for everyone else to do the same as the boss. So there is definitely multiple sides to that aspect of the story. So whilst the boss doesn't like it that his former staff got a better deal elsewhere, we also have to consider that bosses in general all too often hire staff on the lowest wages they can get away with giving that person. So if someone then gets a much better offer elsewhere, I don't think in all fairness, any of us can judge poorly against that person.

Now the boss can rightly bring up the issue of the lack of loyalty of his staff leaving him. But in my experience games development staff are extremely loyal to their bosses, far more than many bosses ever truly want to believe or realize. Yet if only the bosses would truly look rather than assume, they would see their staff are only too happy and willing to invest every idea they have in the company without them ever truly seeing a financial return on their investments for their ideas, simply because the staff want their place of work to succeed. So if a boss has a problem of staff loyalty, like any general leading an army, if moral is so low, then the boss has to take the painful view that moral stems from their leadership.

The irony of that painful truth is that Gamasutra has shown up in the past week a massive cause of bosses destroy their staff's moral. I'm referring to the tactic (highlighted on Gamasutra in multiple stories) of some bosses treating permanent staff as if they are contractors, where these bosses get rid of staff at the end of projects, as its too expensive to keep them around between projects. If any boss does that to staff, then all staff remaining will be shocked and devastated and moral will hugely suffer. Because as much as any boss doesn't want to believe it, that act of loosing staff is gross disloyalty to all staff (including the ones who stay, who will be rightfully fearful of their jobs and their efforts to invest into that business). Therefore once that is done by any boss for any reason, not matter how valid from the bosses point of view, the boss cannot expect loyalty from anyone else, as they have shown such deep disloyalty to others who have tried to invest into their business and had their time sacrifices and idea investments thrown away for them. So when the bosses, even after showing such disloyal to the staff, still see their remaining staff trying to still invest ideas into their company, i.e. staff showing loyalty!, the boss would do very well to reward such loyalty! ... That should be bloody obvious, but sadly as the other Gamasutra stories this week show all to well, it isn't at all obvious to some bosses.

So anyway, we can't know what has gone on behind the scenes in this case, so I can only comment in general about our industry, but even from what we can see of this case, its very clear the staff involved have felt their best move is to leave. So in all fairness, its very hard to judge against them once we consider the point of view of all sides.

Plus (if all of that isn't enough to drive home there is multiple sides to this story), we have to consider the general problem of selling off more than 50% of your company (even if its broken up between different people). This still means that you run the risk of anyone left with just a minority stake in a business. Corporate history is littered with stories of company owners selling off the majority of their business only to end up finding they are out of that business when the shareholders get together and decide they don't want the current CEO. So to find out the shareholders have been meeting behind the current CEO's back to discuss what to do with the business isn't so surprising. I would expect it to happen. They do after all own a total of 59% of the business. So if any of us owned a big slice of a company, we would want to know our money is being used wisely, so we would all want to meet with other shareholders.

So anyway, as I hope you can see, I'm really not trying to take any side. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate to explore as many sides as I can, I hope in a fair way. It does feel like we are only hearing one side to this story, so we need to be fair to all sides.