Silicon Knights sues Epic Games

[ReNo]

And Eternal Darkness, also for the Gamecube! I watched my flatmate play it and he loved it, and I've also got myself a copy but, well, the Gamecube hasn't been used for a while... I'm sure I'll give it a whirl one of these days, as it did look cool

[CompoSITe]

Sk's case actually looks pretty solid.

The suit initially alleges that: "Rather than provide support to Silicon Knights and Epic’s other many licensees of the Engine, Epic intentionally and wrongfully has used the fees from those licenses to launch its own game to widespread commercial success while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games."

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=14759

Should be interesting to see how it turns out.

[Erratic]

The thing that struck me was how specific the document was with its allegations. I was expecting something a lot more vague, laced with legal babble.

Than again, I'm not all that well versed in this sort of thing.

[FMPONE]

If you file a lawsuit it has to be boistrous and over the top in order to clearly allege that there was actually a breach of contract that took place.

You can't say "Epic was not sufficiently timely in their delivery" you have to really paint them as being defficient

[leileilol]

I liked silicon knights when they made DOS games before selling out to console kids

Note that Valve also similarily gave Troika an early junky incomplte Source engine for Vampire but no one cares about that because Valve is god lololol

[KungFuSquirrel]

When you license an incomplete engine, you get incomplete code... That shouldn't shock anyone. Doesn't matter who you're licensing from.

SK may have some merit in elements of the case, but I think once they started demanding that they receive the entirety of Epic's Gears of War profits in damages plus the ability to keep their version of the engine and all their modifications to it as their own property with no licensing costs, I think they crossed the line into ridiculousville.

We'll see what happens I guess.

[FMPONE]

SK may have some merit in elements of the case, but I think once they started demanding that they receive the entirety of Epic's Gears of War profits in damages plus the ability to keep their version of the engine and all their modifications to it as their own property with no licensing costs, I think they crossed the line into ridiculousville.

I mean I understand you're probably overstating it but where do you think thats inferred?

What a mess :X

[FMPONE]

additionally this is disgusting:

"That advantage was nowhere more evident than at E3 2006, where Gears of War was awarded “Best Game in Show” and garnered nothing but laudatory press."

SK are fools if they think that the single and sole reason Gears of War was praised was because of the engine it was running on. What GoW did right run the fucking gambit from concept art to style to any number of non-Engine specific traits from sound to gameplay innovations to just shit like the chainsaw that were unique to the game. This passage seems to allege that had Too Human been running off the same build GoW was it would be equally lauded, which I think is patently laughable and shows you the bitterness and frankly crybaby mentality that summarizes this lawsuit from SK's perspective.

I think its equal parts Epic got a bit of an edge with the code and SK are nowhere near as relevant or successful as Epic and are pointing an easy finger.

[KungFuSquirrel]

Well, I mis-read the "receive all profit" part, but they do ask for Epic to give up the entirety of the profit they made on Gears of War. Check the PDF of the filing, page 52.

[FMPONE]

now that is ab fucking surd, I understand the motive. Because they will only get a vast fraction of what they ask for they ask for it all.

But thats just outrageous and paints them in a vile light.

http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resource ... plaint.pdf

[MrBaracuda]

when can one expect a ruling of some game designer court?

[Bl1tz]

IF AND ONLY IF* what Silicon Knights says about Epic in the suit is true then...

I think Silicon Knights may have a case in terms of Epic misrepresenting themselves as being capable of providing the services they claimed they would. If it's true that Epic is only 75 people in the whole company, I would say that right there is a misrepresentation of their ability to handle their own middleware licensing. I would have thought Epic had that many people working on the engine and licensing alone, nevermind that many throughout the company.

Epic had no less than 2 full games in production (and probably at least one more unannounced game) during the time period Silicon Knights is claiming in their suit...if they really only topped out at 75 people, that is fucking absurd.

Now I know that Epic works with companies like Demiurge for example who handle a lot of the UDN stuff, but Epic shouldn't be contracting that stuff out to other companies who aren't 100% dedicated to dealing with issues that arise from engine licensing.

If you look at id, they only really licensed out their tech to a handful of companies (Raven, HumanHead, etc.) and they were all doing FPS games so you could manage something like that while still maintaining a relatively small team like id does.

I think the courts should look at the size of other prolific middleware houses (especially ones that also develop games as well e.g. Criterion/Renderware) and see what kind of staffing they have to support their clients. It's pretty hard to imagine Epic being able to support the vast number of issues that I'm sure cropped up amongst the legions of developers who licensed the tech with only 75 people total at the company.

* My thoughts are only hypothetical depending on whether or not Silicon Knights is telling the truth!

[Fletch]

It's pretty hard to imagine Epic being able to support the vast number of issues that I'm sure cropped up amongst the legions of developers who licensed the tech with only 75 people total at the company.

They did it with a whole lot less with Unreal 2 tech for half a decade. Seriously. They're talented, end of story on that. Anybody that tries to convince you that that a game studio must absolutely have 400 people to produce a next gen title is either lazy, lacking vision, or a combination of both.

I've read the complaint and it's a mixed bag. Yeah, SK has some valid complaints. The problem is their valid complaints are fairly minor, and happen to be floating in a sea of wild accusations and crazy demands. It makes it harder to take the valid complaints seriously when they do that.

UE3 isn't finished. Anybody developing on that knows it. Hell, it's even in the licensing agreement. We know what's in the pipeline for the next few months, and everybody just has to make judgments about what to do with their game. It is however shippable. As with any tech, it's going to get better and faster as time goes on and efficiencies are added. The same thing happened with UE2.

SK's problems seem to stem from the fact that they can't seem to take responsibility for their product. It's not like E3 sneaks up on anybody. You know months ahead of time what engine build you'll be running off of and what you want to show. It's up to you to take care of your shit and get it running. If it's getting close to E3 and you don't think you can make your demo shine, then hack some features and cap a video at 30 fps so that you can at least show the promise you're going for. A good video with no demo trumps a shitty demo in most cases. There were a half dozen UE3 games running at the E3 in question, and SK seemed to be the only ones who fucked up. Furthermore, the fact that they had a bad E3 and then weren't able to rectify it for this year's E3 is just sad. At some point, somebody at SK needs to sit down and say "Wait, shouldn't we try to actually have a good E3 this year and wash away the bad taste from last year?"

It will be interesting to see this play out. If it actually makes it to court, I have a feeling a lot of complaints will be thrown out during the discovery phase because it will be difficult to prove a lot of vague things like "perceived public relations damage" in a jury trial. It would be akin to somebody not winning an Oscar so they sue the Academy for damages. IT amounts to whining, and it's hard to press that case to a jury (if they had gone to a mediator or a judge instead of requesting a jury trial, this would be different).

[FMPONE]

I agree fletch, I don't think Epic has anything to do with Too Human being a poorly recieved product at E3, the breach of contract element may be arguable but even then its within the confines of an industry where SK has been the only company to step up thus far.

This is really looking like a save face for a poor product

[ReNo]

They aren't the only ones to complain though - Koei cite issues with UE3 as their reason for dropping/delaying/whatever they are now doing with Fatal Inertia on the PS3, and Phil Harrison from Sony also said that the engine does have troubles with the PS3. Not really related of course given that both of those are PS3 specific and Too Human is a 360 game, but figured it was worth mentioning.

I don't know enough about the SK/Epic case to have an opinion on who is in the wrong TBH.