Posted on Friday, July 20 2007 @ 19:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Firingsquad
writes Epic Games has been sued by Silicon Knights, the developers of the upcoming action game Too Human. Silicon Knights claim Unreal Engine 3 doesn't work as Epic represented it and that Epic has been unable or unwilling to fix it:
As Denis Dyack, President and Founder of Silicon Knights, explained, “Our strong preference is to focus on making games, not be in court. Unfortunately though, as explained in our lawsuit, we have had extensive problems with the Unreal Engine 3 that Epic has been unwilling or unable to rectify. For more than a year, we have been trying to reach an agreement with Epic to resolve these issues without resorting to litigation, but were unable to come to reasonable terms with Epic. Regrettably, we are now forced to go to court in order to achieve satisfaction. We remain hopeful, however, that we can reach a reasonable business resolution with Epic at some point.”
The lawsuit further alleges that Epic in fact never intended to deliver Unreal Engine 3 as a fully functional game engine as promised. Instead, Epic collected licensing fees from Silicon Knights and others in order to fund the development of its own video game, Gears of War. “No doubt Gears is a fun and phenomenally successful game, but as we alleged in our complaint against them, we strongly believe that from the perspective of someone waiting for a game engine that Epic promised it would deliver almost two years ago, it seems pretty clear that Gears was built on the backs of the Unreal Engine licensees. We certainly stand by our allegations in the lawsuit that instead of using our licensing fees to develop and support the Unreal Engine 3, Epic used that money to build Gears,” said Mr. Dyack.
And here's the comment from Epic Games VP Mark Rein about the case:
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. 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.
