Stardock, the Michigan-based studio behind games like Elemental: War of Magic and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, is suing its former marketing manager over claims she deleted and destroyed the company's analytics and marketing data before she left the company.

Stardock, the Michigan-based studio behind games like Elemental: War of Magic and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, is suing its former marketing manager over claims she deleted and destroyed the company's analytics and marketing data before she left the company.

The case is being brought against former Stardock marketing manager Alexandra Miseta, who was employed with the company from June 4th, 2007 to August 3rd, 2010 when she resigned without notice.

Stardock claims that in her role as marketing manager, she was required to gather marketing data and perform web analytics, maintain information relating to all trade and marketing shows that Stardock attended or planned to attend, and produce the marketing materials and data for games developed by Stardock. All the analytics and data remained the sole and exclusive property of the company.

The case alleges that Miseta deleted, destroyed and/or stole Stardock's Elemental materials, analytics, and trade show information just before quitting, causing the company to lose all their marketing data and analytics for Elemental: War of Magic only three weeks before the game's scheduled launch.

The case alleges that Miseta deleted, destroyed and/or stole Stardock's Elemental materials, analytics, and trade show information.

Stardock claims that it was forced to spend more than $5000 assessing the damaged caused by Miseta's actions and attempting to restore the Elemental materials, analytics, and trade show information, and that the interruption in availablility of this data caused Stardock to lose more than $1 million in profits.

Stardock says in its filing that the loss of the materials led to a detraction from programming, debugging, and other responsibilities, and Elemental was subsequently unsuccessful in the marketplace, "earning a fraction of its anticipated profits and causing [Stardock] damages of over $1,000,000".

In addition to this, Stardock claims that Miseta did not return the company laptop she had been using, and had in fact been running side businesses during work hours using the company laptop.

Stardock is seeking monetary damages in excess of $1 million, interest costs and attorney fees, and any further relief deemed justified by the Court.

Update: It appears that a personal court case between Stardock CEO Brad Wardell and Alexandra Miseta took place between July 2011 and April 2012. The summary document can be found here. It is not clear from the summary document the exact nature of the case, and searches of the court filing have not turned any results (the case may not have been publicly released).