A disgruntled ex-CEO locked his former video game studio out of its own website, knocked employees offline and triggered more than $1 million in alleged losses — then put the domain up for sale for $6,666,666, a new lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit, filed last week in federal court in Los Angeles, accuses former That’s No Moon Entertainment CEO Michael Mumbauer of seizing control of company-owned domains years after he was fired for cause and using them to sabotage the studio’s operations.
After his 2022 firing, Mumbauer grew “resentful about his termination” and launched a harassment campaign that included threatening a senior executive and their family, the complaint alleges. News of the lawsuit was reported by the gamer news site Aftermath.
“At 6 a.m. on January 6, 2026, Defendant hijacked ThatsNoMoon.com, disabling TNM’s own access to that domain and TNM employees’ ability to e-mail with any external sender or recipient,” the complaint states.
The sudden shutdown left the studio effectively paralyzed, cutting off communications with investors, business partners and job candidates and forcing employees to abandon their normal work to triage the outage, according to the lawsuit.
Visitors who tried to log on to ThatsNoMoon.com were instead redirected to a Swiss travel site, the suit stated.
The bizarre redirect sparked confusion among outsiders, with business partners, gamers and potential hires left wondering whether the company had abruptly shut down or quietly fired key executives who were suddenly unreachable by email, the complaint says.
Mumbauer was terminated “for cause” on Feb. 17, 2022, after the company’s founders and board concluded that his “vision for the company did not align with theirs,” according to the complaint.
The lawsuit alleges that while serving as CEO, Mumbauer “breached his duty to act in TNM’s best interests,” including by leaking “confidential and sensitive information to the media and to competitors.”
In September 2020, Mumbauer co-founded That’s No Moon alongside three other video game developers: Tina Kowalewski, Taylor Kurosaki and Nick Kononelos.
The four executives sought to make “narrative-driven video games” by drawing on their experience from other studios such as Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica, Infinity Ward and PlayStation’s Visual Arts Group.
Shortly after the studio’s founding, the company’s founders agreed to purchase 13 internet domains containing variations of the “That’s No Moon” name, including ThatsNoMoon.com, which became the studio’s primary website, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit says Mumbauer bought the domains on the company’s behalf and was later fully reimbursed, but registered them in his own name and never transferred control to the company.
The lawsuit claims the fallout from the domain seizure cost the studio more than $1 million in January alone, as its four-person IT team scrambled for days to migrate services to a new web address and repair cascading technical failures.
After the initial outage, the complaint says the hijacked domain was redirected to a GoDaddy auction page listing it for sale at $6,666,666, while other company domains were similarly pointed to “for sale” pages that risked further confusion and reputational harm.
The complaint filed by That’s No Moon speculated that the $6,666,666 sum is “[a] number that [Mumbauer] may well have selected for its Satanic connotation.”
The company says it filed suit after securing federal trademark registrations for “That’s No Moon” and related marks, arguing that Mumbauer’s continued control of the domains now constitutes trademark infringement, cybersquatting and computer fraud.
The Post has sought comment from Mumbauer and TNM.
Credit: Source link
