First and foremost, http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/07/SK EPIC Complaint.pdf. That is the entire legal complaint filed by SK. I've read the whole thing, and I gotta say, if it's all correct, Epic is seriously boned. Basically what SK claims is that: Epic knowingly lied about the capabilities of UE3 and sold it to SK knowing they couldn't provide the tools they advertised Epic failed to meet several deadlines. They promised SK a full, working engine no later than 6 months after 360 and PS3 dev-kits had arrived, and this did not happen, which accounts for a breech of contract Epic withheld code and refused to give support and updated code to SK in order to eliminate the competition that licensed UE3. SK points to E3 '06 as an example. They claim that Epic willingly withheld several major functions, builds and updates of the UE3 engine in order to impress the media and consumers with gears of war. They claim that the build of UE3 they were given was no where near the level of the build of UE3 that was displayed running Gears of War, and as such, their game suffered tremendously. SK was forced to completely ditch UE3 because Epic would not provide them with support and give them the code and tools they needed. SK was forced to create their own engine from scratch, setting major delays and costing millions of dollars. Epic promised that the UE3 engine they gave SK was capable of more than just FPS style games, but the tools and code needed to do that was left out, or didn't work. Using the UE3 engine given to them, SK, despite their best efforts, was not able to meet Microsofts most basic performance benchmarks. There are other, more specific claims as well. SK claims that Epic never provided proper multi-threading code, proper streamlined rendering code, and the engine suffered from severe load spikes and the inability to efficiently handle "garbage data." SK claims that Epic illegally withheld all of this code in order to make their UE3 games appear superior to the competition. SK was pushed to the point of either giving up and going out of business, sticking with the crippled UE3 engine and producing a crap game, or starting over from scratch and writing their own engine, which they did. But don't take my bumbling mess for it. Read the complaint yourself. Warning: It's kinda long.
This will be interesting to follow, but if they do sue Epic successfully and prevent UT3 from being released I will not be held accountable for my actions. Not sure how much of this is down to lack of training and how much is down to epic though.
One of the "Prayers" at the end of the complaint is that they want Epic to "disgorge all profits obtained on its Gears of War game as a result of the misconduct set forth above." I doubt that will happen, but I bet SK can get a lot of damages paid to them if they provide enough evidence to back up their claims.
Sorry, I haven't read it yet (new reinstall), but that just sounds like they want money, realistically they should claim back the cost of their contract aswell as costs for extra time spent making a new engine.
Interesting read is that PDF (though I'm only up to page 20 currently) but so far it seems as if SK is just getting peeved that they lack the ability to use the UE3 engine as efficiently as Epic, which sounds about right as EPIC wrote it, they will be the ones who best know how to use it. Maybe reading untill the end however will change my view.
I seriously dont understand why when dev's cant produce on time own up as say sorry and sort the problem insted of resulting to this? Sure they wanted to pimp GoW then why didjnt they have a claue in the contract saying that? These people are good at making games but not good at thinking ahead or getting any sort of structure to their deals. I hope they get shafted.
It's bad project management, the original User Requirements Document and Business Plan must have been flawed in order to take it to court, if they were done correctly then there would be a clause in the for what happens if something goes over budget or if certain risks occur (and a major risk is an unfinished engine being delivered on time and efficiently enough!)
Frankly I can careless about epic... I'd actually bust out laughing all day if this lawsuit did good, I'd love to see the look on mark rein's face during that.
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=136554 Someones 2 timing again. Gotta be faster than that Tim to break news on the forum.
vs. Prize goes to Neogumbercules. I hate seeing devs squabbling. It's like...what's the point? We're supposed to be on the same side at the end of the day.
