According to court documents obtained by Kotaku, Silicon Knights’ four-year-old lawsuit against Epic Games can finally go before a jury. Back in 2007, the Too Human developer alleged that Epic caused damage to the game by not providing proper support or “a working game engine.” Silicon Knights further accused Epic of withholding an improved version of the Unreal Engine, while using licensing fees to develop Gears of War.
Silicon Knights hails the federal court’s decision to move to a jury trial as a “victory in their litigation against Epic."
"When Epic first went public about our case to the press, they said that our claims were without merit," said SK president Denis Dyack. "Two separate federal court judges have now disagreed with Epic, and have ruled that the case does have merit."
"Silicon Knights has always wanted to have our focus be on making great games, not litigation. This ruling will allow us to have our day in court, before a jury, and to shine the light publicly on Epic's conduct. We are very confident the jury will see the truth behind Epic's actions,” Dyack said.
Court documents highlight problems in Epic’s forthcoming case, including business practices and promises made to licensees. Evidence apparently includes internal e-mails ordering employees to focus on Gears of War.
“Epic had a possible motive to deceive SK into entering into the License Agreement in order to fund the development costs of its own games and delay the work of SK and other competing licensees on their video games. There is also Epic's admission in its counterclaim that it developed the [Unreal Engine 3] in conjunction with the development of its own game as part of its ‘synergistic model' and not separately as it had led SK to believe,” read the court document.
“SK cites t[w]o internal emails from Epic's officers instructing programmers that ‘Gears [of War] comes first, so if you have any Gears tasks, drop work in the main branch and finish Gears tasks.”
It looks like it’s going to be a rough road for Epic Games.
6 Comments
March 31, 2011
This suit shows one of the main reasons developers often worry when they license tech from other developers. Also it shows one of the possible woes for the company providing the license. You have to keep a clean house with not even a hint you are taking advantage.
March 31, 2011
Certain elements of the lawsuit have been dropped, but it's put Epic in a hard position - there's certainly potential for a conflict of interest here, and that's why the suit is still going forward. There's still the counter-suit by Epic as well that said that SK was using UE3 unlicensed after they supposedly dropped it - that's another can of worms.
Also this just in: Too Human still not very good.
March 31, 2011
Too Human wasn't a great game, but this bit of info can shed light to why the game had such of an incomplete and rushed feel to the game.
March 31, 2011
The version of Too Human on Xbox 360 was in development for more than three years when it came out in 2008, and they had more than two years to improve the game after it's poor showing at E3 2006. Other matters of this suit aside, the onus of Too Human's quality falls on Silicon Knights.
My prediction is that all the suits and counter-suits will get settled and dismissed before they go to court - I don't think either side wants this to drag on through the courts in various appeals any longer than this absolutely has to.
April 1, 2011
If this was true, wouldn't Bioshock have suffered the same issues as Too Human? Bioshock was released 08/2007, and Too Human was released a year later. Bioshock used the unreal engine 3, Gears of war was released in 11/2006.
I never heard Ken Levine and CO complain about Epic, and they release an awesome game using the same engine a year earlier than TH. Too Human was just not that good. I really wanted to love it, as I loved the real movie marketing they did for it, and loved Norse mythology, but the game was average at best. I didn't finish it...
April 2, 2011
SK will have zero problem demonstrating that Epic both keeps an internal version of UE for their own (breach) and fails to support their licensed code (breach). They should subpoena the entire contents of the UDN forums just to make Epic rent a forklift to submit the printed copies.
This isn't about whether SK's product sucked or if it's theoretically possible to overcome UE's limitations in finite time...this is about anti-competitive business practices, plain and simple.
If Epic had brain, they would have split their game development into a separate corporate entity and licensed UE on ridiculously favorable terms from a middleware-providing company with proper support staff. They chose not to do that and have made zero bones about changing UE only in ways that are favorable to their internal development for Gears.
Epic FAIL.