Silicon Knights Files Lawsuit Against Epic

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http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=14759

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According to a statement from Epic's Mark Rein sent to leading news outlets including Gamasutra, the Unreal Engine 3 creator is the subject of a lawsuit from licensee Silicon Knights, presumably regarding UE3-utilizing Xbox 360 title Too Human.

Rein's statement, sent out to the media this afternoon, reads as follows: "This morning we were served with a lawsuit by Silicon Knights. We believe the claims against us are unfounded and without merit and we intend to fully defend against them."

The Epic VP continues: "We'd love to tell you more about it but unfortunately our lawyers want us to save our comments for the courthouse so we're going to do our best to comply with their wishes."

He concludes: "In that vein we'd appreciate if our friends in the industry and media would refrain from asking us about the suit because we're only going to say "no comment". We just wanted to share the news directly before the rumor mill starts churning."
 
More details at Gamespot

According to the suit, Epic "has caused Silicon Knights to experience considerable losses and ultimately has forced Silicon Knights to spend its limited time and resources on building its own game engine rather than in developing its video game." It goes on to say that instead of supporting its licensing partners, Epic has used its fees to develop its own competing products "while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games."
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I hope this doesn't affect Too Human from getting delayed too much.
 
Sounds like Too Human would be set back quite a long while since they're now attempting to transition everything done so far to a new proprietary engine.

As for the case itself, very interesting. I'd like to see evidence from both parties.

Edit:

My guess at the most likely scenario of what happened is that Epic promised to deliver UE3 code by the aforementioned dates. Their delivery date slipped, this happens in business, gamers are quite familiar with how often it happens in software businesses. Deadlines get missed. So late delivery clauses are invoked from the contract terms. If those aren't on the contract, then it goes to a court for arbitration like it is now. Epic can only be penalized for what it is accused of, so SK covered both failure to meet contract, as well as the possiblity of intentional failure(far more serious). SK probably can't prove intent since that's very difficult to do. Most likely it'll end up with the contract between them nulled, and possibly some small award to SK. The accuser can set the maximum penalty, they don't get to choose what it actually is, and Gears profits will not be handed over.
 
Epic may have been late, but I have trouble believing anything else SK says since RoboBlitz, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia already came out. Most of the other games that are going to be using the UT3 engine look great, and seem to be coming along nicely.
 
SK's office is about 5 minutes from me. The street they are on has a lot of lousy bars that like to serve minors that don't know how to dress properly.

This has nothing to do with the topic but I wanted to share that.
 
BladeVenom said:
Epic may have been late, but I have trouble believing anything else SK says since RoboBlitz, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia already came out. Most of the other games that are going to be using the UT3 engine look great, and seem to be coming along nicely.
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Rainbow 6 used a modified UE 2.5 engine and the parts of UE3 that were ready. Roboblitz was done with an early evaluation build of UE3. Don't know about Monster Madness.

As for Epic missing the deadline. It's kinda bad for them because I think SK have a fairly good chance of showing that the reason they missed it is because they were concentrating on gears and not their duties as a middleware licenser. Most of the other UE3 games have been delayed at some point or another in their dev cycle and there's quite a bit of supporting evidence from developer interviews out there.
 
Will be interesting to see what happens. I don't think any of us have the right information to make accurate conclusions.
 
What I find interesting is SK wants Epic to forfeit all profits received from Gears of War.
 
Didn't Silicon Knights put out Cyber Empires for the 386/486 machines like 10 years ago?

Damn, loved that game.
 
JStudrawa said:
Didn't Silicon Knights put out Cyber Empires for the 386/486 machines like 10 years ago?

Damn, loved that game.
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Yes! I had forgotten that game. Yes they did. Awesome.

They also did Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. I loved that game too.
 
BladeVenom said:
Epic may have been late, but I have trouble believing anything else SK says since RoboBlitz, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia already came out. Most of the other games that are going to be using the UT3 engine look great, and seem to be coming along nicely.
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sure, those games came out, but i believe Too Human was the most similar to Gears of War, and if this is true about the engine not being supported, than it could be that Epic didn't want Too Human cutting into Gears' profit margins.
 
Sony sent a team of engineers to Epic recently to "assist in development of the U3 engine on the PS3"

Epic is one of my favorite gaming companies, but it sounds like they stretched themselves thin and probably promised a bit more than they could deliver.

edit: From phil harrison
"Also, Epic isn’t a huge company. They don’t have unlimited resource. We have parachuted in some of our SWAT team of super engineers to help them.
 
Technoob said:
Sony sent a team of engineers to Epic recently to "assist in development of the U3 engine on the PS3"

Epic is one of my favorite gaming companies, but it sounds like they stretched themselves thin and probably promised a bit more than they could deliver.

edit: From phil harrison
"Also, Epic isn’t a huge company. They don’t have unlimited resource. We have parachuted in some of our SWAT team of super engineers to help them.
Click to expand...


lol sounds like epic hit a wall in the ps3s power so sonys going to try to make sure the game looks good but idk if its going to be possible. Sounds like they are having series problems though. Its already been said the console versions were going to be dumbed down with slower gameplay and lower graphics. I bet they are having frame rate problems most likely.
 
BladeVenom said:
Epic may have been late, but I have trouble believing anything else SK says since RoboBlitz, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia already came out. Most of the other games that are going to be using the UT3 engine look great, and seem to be coming along nicely.
Click to expand...

I felt the same way until talking to a friend of mine who works for a developer here in LA working on a UE3 title, and he says they've had nothing but problems with it. I'm really surprised, though, but it *is* possible, and certainly not unheard of, that they could be giving a gimped version to licensee's and keeping the better stuff for themselves.

Of course, it's just as likely that their programmers are better at utilizing it because--duh, they built the fucking thing :)
 
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