Developer Sues Beyonce Over Licensed Dance Game--Also, Apparently There Was Going to be a Beyonce Dance Game
When you're finding video game related stories on New York Magazine's
entertainment blog, you just know they're going to be a little bit
insane. Such is the case today, when we happened to stumble upon news
that game development house Gate Five is suing former Destiny's Child
member and current solo diva Beyonce Knowles over a a licensed dance game deal gone
awry.
According to the summons obtained by Vulture, Beyonce and her company, Beyonce Inc.--perfect, just perfect--had a contractual agreement to produce a game called StarPower: Beyonce, a motion sensing game for an undisclosed platform that would have featured a selection of Beyonce hits that all the single ladies up in their living rooms--not to mention the occasional unmarried baby--could dance along to.
And this is how a million Kinect owners would have ended up with severe groin tears. The complaint states that just prior to Christmas last year, Knowles abruptly put the kibosh on the whole deal, after a "extortionate demand for entirely new compensation terms she wanted." This sent the financier of the project running screaming away from the whole thing, thus leading to Beyonce pulling out entirely.
According to Gate Five, this effectively killed the studio, with 70 people suddenly finding themselves out of work as a result of Knowles' reneging on her contract. The studio is seeking $100 million in compensation for breach of contract.
Up to this point, no Beyonce tracks have appeared in other dance titles, including Just Dance and Dance Central, but given the success of those titles, as well as Ubisoft's Michael Jackson: The Experience game, one could safely surmise that Knowles may have simply decided to try and make a deal with a bigger studio for her own game, because in all fairness, we have no idea who Gate Five even is. Google searches for the studio's info only bring up links to other people writing this same story, websites for bars and art galleries, and the occasional reference to an airport.
Not that Gate Five's relative obscurity makes the situation any less shady and unconscionable. Gate Five claims that the nasty way in which this went down shocked even Knowles' manager father--who, incidentally, Beyonce fired last month. On the plus side, Beyonce has now completed another important trial in her goal toward achieving top tier diva status. Namely, the "screw over an entire company's worth of people purely on a ridiculous whim" challenge. Now all she has to do is have a drunken, shouty episode in an airport, marry six more people, and find the jade monkey before the next full moon, and she'll be able to rank up with the likes of Dianna Ross and Liza Minnelli. We should all be so lucky.
According to the summons obtained by Vulture, Beyonce and her company, Beyonce Inc.--perfect, just perfect--had a contractual agreement to produce a game called StarPower: Beyonce, a motion sensing game for an undisclosed platform that would have featured a selection of Beyonce hits that all the single ladies up in their living rooms--not to mention the occasional unmarried baby--could dance along to.
And this is how a million Kinect owners would have ended up with severe groin tears. The complaint states that just prior to Christmas last year, Knowles abruptly put the kibosh on the whole deal, after a "extortionate demand for entirely new compensation terms she wanted." This sent the financier of the project running screaming away from the whole thing, thus leading to Beyonce pulling out entirely.
According to Gate Five, this effectively killed the studio, with 70 people suddenly finding themselves out of work as a result of Knowles' reneging on her contract. The studio is seeking $100 million in compensation for breach of contract.
Up to this point, no Beyonce tracks have appeared in other dance titles, including Just Dance and Dance Central, but given the success of those titles, as well as Ubisoft's Michael Jackson: The Experience game, one could safely surmise that Knowles may have simply decided to try and make a deal with a bigger studio for her own game, because in all fairness, we have no idea who Gate Five even is. Google searches for the studio's info only bring up links to other people writing this same story, websites for bars and art galleries, and the occasional reference to an airport.
Not that Gate Five's relative obscurity makes the situation any less shady and unconscionable. Gate Five claims that the nasty way in which this went down shocked even Knowles' manager father--who, incidentally, Beyonce fired last month. On the plus side, Beyonce has now completed another important trial in her goal toward achieving top tier diva status. Namely, the "screw over an entire company's worth of people purely on a ridiculous whim" challenge. Now all she has to do is have a drunken, shouty episode in an airport, marry six more people, and find the jade monkey before the next full moon, and she'll be able to rank up with the likes of Dianna Ross and Liza Minnelli. We should all be so lucky.
