News Silicon Knights files lawsuit against Epic Games

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/07/20/silicon_knights_files_lawsuit_against_epic_games/1

Mark Rein, VP at Epic Games has revealed that Silicon Knights has filed a lawsuit against the Unreal Engine 3 creator.

 

Surely Silicon Knights will have to show that Epic wilfully held back giving them the UE3 code? I'd have thought that would be nigh on impossible to prove.

Maybe it's just bad blood because they know their game is flawed, and they're diverting the flak by blaming someone else first...maybe there is a case to answer...maybe it's just yet another frivolous lawsuit.

I know which one my money is on

 

well microsoft aint going to let anything happen gears of war or epic since gears is microsofts big drive game till halo so SK will hav to pull something serious out of the bag to get something but i hope they do

 

I get the impression from the tone of Epic that they had good reason to hold back the engine. However if SK were promised on a particular date and it wasn't met then I'm sure they have some sort of case.

 

My my, that's some pretty nasty allegations being made there. I guess something like this was going to happen sooner or later, with soo much riding on each released game now. Hope these allegations turn out to be false. The implications of this could be very damaging in the long run if proven true. Sounds to me like a witch hunt by SK, in order to deflect focus from their own internal problems. Stay tuned for the truth I guess.

 

To be honest I think Epic are in trouble here and this could turn into a class action suit with people like Koei getting in on the act. UE3 promised the earth but in some cases hasn't delivered - for example Bioware found that the lighting in UE3 was a bit rubbish so they wrote their own which Epic has now licensed back off them to put it into UE3. Epic have never been great at the support for their engines either.

 

It's very poor risk management, any Project Manager worth their salt would have some kind of clause in the original agreement saying what would happen if the stuff wasn't delivered on time.

I'm not saying that Epic aren't to blame, but RB6:Vegas is on UT3, that looks absolutely sweet

 

Its doesn't look that sweet, it has low res textures and for all it it graphical gloss (or lack of) performs very average and on the PC requires a lot of grunt for crappy resolutions (1280x960), this is an engine thats supposed to make the transistion between platforms easier for developers and provide optimised end results on each platform, this clearly is not happening.

 

I'm talking about Xbox 360 which is what the complaint is filed about

 

it's about all versions of the engine AFAIK.

 

Well, if UBISOFT can make it work, then I'm sure SK can

 

Nice publicity for their upcoming game, regardless of how good it is. Name dropping Epic/Unreal3 that is.

Before reading this, i'd never heard of their game, or the company.