Silicon Knights Sues Epic Games for Unreal Engine 3

[malware]

Canadian game developer Silicon Knights (http://www.siliconknights.com/main.html), maker of Eternal Darkness, has filed a lawsuit against Epic Games, famous for Gears of War and its Unreal Tournament series, in federal court in Greenville, North Carolina. In the lawsuit, Silicon Knights alleges that it has lost revenue as a result of the considerable delay in developing its video game for the Xbox 360: Too Human, powered by the Unreal Engine 3. The lawsuit further alleges that Epic in fact never intended to deliver Unreal Engine 3 as a fully functional game engine as promised. Instead, Epic collected licensing fees from Silicon Knights and others in order to fund the development of its own video game, Gears of War. A PDF file with the full details (http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/07/SK%20EPIC%20Complaint.pdf) of the suit is available for download from Kotaku (http://kotaku.com/gaming/busted/unreal-engine-3-half+baked-broken-and-late-280548.php).

Source: DailyTech (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8117)

[ChaoticBlankness]

Wow, that's an interesting accusation to be making.

Our typical response would to to shrug it off and disregard it as some company that's greedy and wants money from epic... however, I wonder if there's any truth to it?

[Grings]

i can see the logic behind the accusation myself, its like the guys who made vampire the masquerade: bloodlines, they had to wait ages because they were using source, and had to wait through valves numerous delays (though they could have used that time to sort out the numerous bugs) and ended up shutting down just after releasing (and before fixing) their game

[Kreij]

Read the whole pdf file of the accusations. Gets somewhat technical on the problems that the Engine given to licensees contains. Interesting read.

[a111087]

i can see the logic behind the accusation myself, its like the guys who made vampire the masquerade: bloodlines, they had to wait ages because they were using source, and had to wait through valves numerous delays (though they could have used that time to sort out the numerous bugs) and ended up shutting down just after releasing (and before fixing) their game

and yet vampire is still full of well known bugs, even after unofficial Troika 3.3 patch(which appeared ~2 years after the game release) :roll:
still.. the game was great

[Benpi]

Shoulda used Crytek 2 engine.

[WarEagleAU]

Buh...seems Epics engine is still a problem