Music star Beyoncé Knowles is on the receiving end of a lawsuit... over a video-game. According to American game developer Gate Five LLC, the mega-star 'destroyed [its] business on a whim'. The company claims that Beyoncé destroyed plans for a title called Starpower: Beyoncé, forcing the company to lay-off seventy employees just a week before Christmas. The company claims that Beyoncé agreed to license her image to the company for a 'lucrative joint venture'.
According to Gate Five, the company invested $7,000,000 into the production of the title. The game allowed players to dance along to songs by the popular American artist, though in mid-December she changed her mind on the agreement. Development of the title had reached a 'crucial point', and apparently Beyoncé 'made an extortionate demand for entirely new compensation terms'. The financier of the project backed out, and the plan fell apart.
Court papers declare that 'a bad faith breach of contract so callous that, on what appeared to be a whim, she destroyed Gate Five's business and drove 70 people into unemployment'. Gate Five's founder spoke to New York Magazine about the situation, and claims that even Beyoncé's own father was disappointed with her actions. Currently, the singer has not responded to the allegations.
Unusually for a gaming company, its website cannot be found via Google search. The first results appear to be different links to the report about their lawsuit against the singer, and searching the MobyGames database yields no results.
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