While the lawsuit cites the output resolution on the box, it also expands on the propagation of the impression that MP was "native 1080p" through its marketing and disclosures to game sites.
There is at least more to that argument than there is in pointing at the box.
There is a technical distinction to be made between what was generally assumed and what was actually provided, and the marketing department either glossed over or did not know/understand the exact particulars of the MP mode's rendering method.
It's hard to pin general assumptions that nobody cared to actually define on Sony. At the very least, it may be able to get the "fool me once" first offender free pass, and the market will have to adjust by actually knowing a little more about what it's talking about.
The filing cites gaming press pieces describing the inferior results of upscaled output. The "native" label in everyday gamer vernacular was centered around not having a reduced resolution game output upscaled. The suit goes further to state that this is an interpolated output, and that KZ's method that also has a component of interpolation must be the same thing. That's potentially overbroad, in a quadrilateral is a square is a rhombus is a rectangle is a trapezoid sort of way.
The fineness of the distinction is something that I would feel works against the suit, and the suit does go on to harp on the "unqualified 1080p" on the packaging as an additional attempt to mislead.
I feel it's actually trying to go in two directions at once, trying to dive further into technical subtleties about the half-resolution source frames that feed into the 1080p frame buffer while simultaneously pointing to an "unqualified" catch-all marketing term that was of already dubious precision through the collective actions of an industry and its customers.
The impact, as described by the suit, is that the resulting blurry output is something that cannot happen with 1080p.
While it is true that there would likely be more clarity to the game if its three source frames were not half-resolution, it is sadly not the case that clarity is a given at 1080p.
The renderer does put out a 1080p buffer. Whether a particular title uses that wealth of pixels as well as another possible implementation hasn't been encoded into any statute.
The method Guerrilla used would look noticeably different if the renderer were set to output at 720p, with all its other ratios kept the same.
While it would interesting to make excessive blur a civil offense, there isn't a legal standard that states "you must be this clear to be 1080p". The lawsuit is effectively arguing that the client didn't like how KZ built the 2,073,600 pixels in its frame, not that they weren't built.
I think it is fair that Guerilla was taken to task for not clearly describing the method used from a technical standpoint, but I do not know what metric can be used to translate that internal distinction to something sufficiently contrary to what was said in the infinitely blurrier language used in the general market.
