I bet ID had their lawyer on the phone yesterday.
Breaking: Silicon Knights Files Lawsuit Against Epic
- Thread starter scooby_dooby
- Start date
I bet ID had their lawyer on the phone yesterday.
I think you find the judge saying this in the majority of the cases.
"Now explain to me how Epic actions in early 2006 related to a certain marketing event harmed your game whose release date is late 2007/2008/2009 and was never holiday 2006."
They'll claim lost sales from it, obviously. That's not very meaningful, though. What's meaningful is that they didn't have a working renderer when they were supposed to have one, which totally screwed up the game's schedule.
This raises an interesting question over Sony helping with UE3.0 optimization. It's believed that middleware will be the primary engines of cross-platform games, and UE3.0 was expected to be the principle player. If everyone's using UE3.0, you want it fully optimized for your platform. Yet it appears people aren't using UE3.0, as for whatever announcements were made when GOW was looking great and everyone was talking about UE3.0, no-one's actually shipping UE3.0 titles. Thus perhaps UE3,0 isn't highly used, and an optimized platform won't do Sony any good as those people wanting cross-platform development won't touch UE3.0 'coz it's no good to them on XB360, no matter how well it may run on other platforms?
I think that once people announce "we're using UE3.0," they've signed a license which states "you are required to use UE3.0, you can't back out" as indicated in SK's filing. I think it is being heavily used, just that there are problems with it that are causing delays. I wouldn't be surprised if Epic allows licensees to back out in the near future as a "oh god please don't take us to court" thing.
By then though, surely those licensees will be thinking along the lines of SK? 'We've been waiting flippin' 12 months for you ton sort this out! We're 12 months behind on development and earnings. We want compensation.' Especially if the license contracts them into using UE3.0 and not backing out!
Oh, I don't think that will prevent people from going to court, no. I think you'll see people backing out and suing simultaneously.
Any delay doesn't automatically mean loss of sales. A summer 07 moved to a holiday 07 date could be argued as a plus. SK is basically arguing that the delay combined with TH being unfavorably and unfairly compared to GeW prompted the current situation. TH was one of the few games actually shown and compared to GeW, so the majority of U3E developers can't make a case on the same grounds as SK.
If the schedule gets screwed up, though, that wreaks havoc with personnel and other projects. That's going to be the focus of the lawsuit, I assume.
It could be loss of sales if you game would have been cutting-edge one year, and derivative a year or two later. That would be pretty hard to argue in court, I'd think.
Cross-platform includes PC. You can build a game on PC relatively easily then bring it to PS3, this makes sense even for a PS3-exclusive game. Then there's one genre where PC still excels, it's MMOG. SOE has The Agency for PC/PS3. Probably NCSoft will use UE3 in their future project too as seen in their use of UE in their past games. These developers still think first in PC then think about port unlike those who moved their development base from PC to console.
I would assume that you would have to show a loss that would be unrecoverable due to the delay. Regardless, noone is going to want to recover 6 months of additional expenses related to the delay minus any expense that would have occured anyway and licensing fees at the expense of further delay because you gave up the rights to U3E. Once you extract licensing fees for breach of contract that contract is no longer valid and so are your rights to the engine.
Remember, SK stated that they would develop their own engine right after E3 2006. A judge is not going to be too kind to any developer that waited over a year to do the same. So all you got is a licensing fee plus 6 months of expenses at the cost of a year plus work with the U3 engine gone. Tack on additional time required to build a new engine or wrap your head around a new third party engine and suing starts to seem like a waste of time and money.
Last edited by a moderator:
The difference of 6 months is not going to be a big deal when GeW has been out for 9 months and still no U3E based game has surpassed it.
IMHO, SK is completely right in claiming that damage has ben inflicted to them. Only question is will they be able to prove it in that manner that is obvious that law is broken.
Why I think that SK is right?
The best example is Dark Sector.
This game was announced when PS3 was. It has been developed by Digital Extremes. DE is to Epic what Splash Damage is to id (or at least something like that)- in other words they're or used to be very close companies.
If you take look this gameplay trailer:
http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_darksector_e32k7_elementalcarnage_gp_gt_h264.wmv
You'll see extremely similarity with other "behind shoulder" UE(3) based games. Blood shader is peculiar 'cos it's so resembling with GoW, Turok, and Army Of Two:
http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_armyoftwo_e32k7_duckcover_gp_gt_h264.wmv
AoT is so GoW-alike it's amazing. It looks like UE3 is really tailored for "over the shoulder" games, and games like TH and LO are simply put aside. In other words UE3 is all but not flexible engine as it was firs impression.
Let's get back to DE. They're claiming that they're using completely "in-house" build engine - Sector Engine. But if you take look at the trailer, and you know the history of this company and the fact that they only have experience with Epics' stuff, then is not hard to conclude that Sector Engine is really "biffed-up" EU2(.5).
I'll remind you that Ubi is using UE2 for long time and doing they own enhancement, but also using some Epic's tech. But at the end of the day SC"DA is using engine that they call "Splinter Cell" Engine! And if you open some of their shader definitions you'll see bunch of references toward EPIC's code.
So basically, it's posible to use Epic's tech and to call it your own, but that depends on Epic's interests and good will. Mine guess is that SK was trying to invoke good will inside CliffyB and Mark Rain, but they failed, so they've decided to sue them. And they have good chance to win!
Why I think that SK is right?
The best example is Dark Sector.
This game was announced when PS3 was. It has been developed by Digital Extremes. DE is to Epic what Splash Damage is to id (or at least something like that)- in other words they're or used to be very close companies.
If you take look this gameplay trailer:
http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_darksector_e32k7_elementalcarnage_gp_gt_h264.wmv
You'll see extremely similarity with other "behind shoulder" UE(3) based games. Blood shader is peculiar 'cos it's so resembling with GoW, Turok, and Army Of Two:
http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_armyoftwo_e32k7_duckcover_gp_gt_h264.wmv
AoT is so GoW-alike it's amazing. It looks like UE3 is really tailored for "over the shoulder" games, and games like TH and LO are simply put aside. In other words UE3 is all but not flexible engine as it was firs impression.
Let's get back to DE. They're claiming that they're using completely "in-house" build engine - Sector Engine. But if you take look at the trailer, and you know the history of this company and the fact that they only have experience with Epics' stuff, then is not hard to conclude that Sector Engine is really "biffed-up" EU2(.5).
I'll remind you that Ubi is using UE2 for long time and doing they own enhancement, but also using some Epic's tech. But at the end of the day SC"DA is using engine that they call "Splinter Cell" Engine! And if you open some of their shader definitions you'll see bunch of references toward EPIC's code.
So basically, it's posible to use Epic's tech and to call it your own, but that depends on Epic's interests and good will. Mine guess is that SK was trying to invoke good will inside CliffyB and Mark Rain, but they failed, so they've decided to sue them. And they have good chance to win!
I wouldn't exactly call it 'good will'. It would appear that, under the terms of the license, the licensee is granted the sole property of any enhancements they make to the engine. UE probably would have been a hard sell if they hadn't allowed derivative works to remain 'untainted' by the original copyright (unlike, say, the GPL or some other commercial IP for that matter). Being at Epics mercy as to whether you're allowed to keep using what you've developed during work on an UE game (and pay for the 'pleasure', regardless of it later being decoupled from the engine) doesn't sound like a commercial developer would do to license some middleware (unless they're doing pure 'contract work for hire' and were going to give it up anyway)
archangelmorph
Veteran
I'd say this sounds like it has a pretty case..
If not for the single anomaly that is Mass Effect (which by what I can tell has looked as good as, & even recently looks alot better than, Gears of War..)
I'm not sure what the arrangement is between Bioware and Epic but either Bioware have extremely talented engine coders who basically turned Epic's engine upside down (which it looks like if you compare media from the game released late last year with the more recent media; it looks like a completely different engine..) or Bioware gets special treatment, the latter of which I don't particular hold as credible but it's a possibility..
If not for the single anomaly that is Mass Effect (which by what I can tell has looked as good as, & even recently looks alot better than, Gears of War..)
I'm not sure what the arrangement is between Bioware and Epic but either Bioware have extremely talented engine coders who basically turned Epic's engine upside down (which it looks like if you compare media from the game released late last year with the more recent media; it looks like a completely different engine..) or Bioware gets special treatment, the latter of which I don't particular hold as credible but it's a possibility..
Mass Effect was originally supposed to be a late 06 title. wasnt it?
L. Scofield
Veteran
Except for the framerate...
Color me Dan
Regular
It seems strange to me that a deal of this magnitude could go through without some form of gurantee in place as a safeguard for the developers (SK among them). There was a good reference about the phone companies, and alot of other industries that have safe guards in different forms like penalties. They are in a buisness that affect hundreds of thousands of people on a corporate level, obviously they are under scrutiny.
Didn't they create some kind of framework for their buisness that would forsee these problems if they are indeed true? Or at least have some kind of insight in what their actions affect licensees? Seems to me they've created a situation where they are the centre of attention and has become unprepared for the consequences of supply and demand.
I know ID doesn't have this problem because they are limited in their workforce and thusly in support, but the companies that they license too do get the support they need when they need it.
I use ID as an example because they are the only other licensing dev team i know of more then in passing.
Didn't they create some kind of framework for their buisness that would forsee these problems if they are indeed true? Or at least have some kind of insight in what their actions affect licensees? Seems to me they've created a situation where they are the centre of attention and has become unprepared for the consequences of supply and demand.
I know ID doesn't have this problem because they are limited in their workforce and thusly in support, but the companies that they license too do get the support they need when they need it.
I use ID as an example because they are the only other licensing dev team i know of more then in passing.
Similar threads
