Epic Games Sued By Silicon Knights
Epic Games’ Vice Presicent Mark Rein notified Game Daily BIZ that Too Human developer Silicon Knights is suing Epic Games, claiming that the Unreal Engine is “inadequate” and causing “serious damage” to the gaming industry.
Rein commented on the lawsuit:
"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. 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.
Silicon Knights licensed the Unreal 3 Engine to build their game, but has been running into problems during development. They have had to delay the release for some time, and are now claiming that the delays are due to the Unreal 3 Engine. The lawsuit states that the Unreal Engine was provided to the developer too late in the development cycle, and is the reason behind the terrible performance of Too Human at E3 2006.
Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack rebutted with this statement:
”We stand behind everything in our complaint and believe it is highly unfortunate that Epic forced us into this situation. We would rather spend our time focusing on making great games, but as stated in our complaint, Epic simply refuses to acknowledge the inadequacies of the Unreal Engine 3 code it provides to its licensees," he said, "and refuses to accept the fact that its code has caused serious damage not only to Silicon Knights, but a number of other developers in the industry. We look forward to successful resolution of our claims in this court proceeding."
Gamasutra managed to obtain the entire 52-page lawsuit, where Silicon Knights demands a trial by jury for an alleged breach of contract regarding the licensing of the Unreal 3 Engine.
Silicon Knights Suing Epic Games [Game Daily BIZ]
Toots
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 19 July 2007
· Comments (1)
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As wild as this sounds, I think SK's claims might have some merit. I've been a Alpha/Beta tester for Auran's upcoming game, Fury, and have watched the developers struggle with the Unreal 3 engine like an unwieldy child that insists on avoiding baths.
The gameplay is solid, and really brings a lot of new innovations to the MMO-PVP space, but the graphics engine is presenting a lot of problems when it comes to performance. The game would probably be in a releasable state by now, but I anticipate them needing to spend quite a lot more time wrestling with the optimization.