Silicon Knights And Epic Going To Court
November 3rd, 2007 by Erich Jurgens in Articles, Business, News
As you may or may not know, Digital Battle has been following the legal battle between Silicon Knights and Epic for a while now. Epic has tried to play cool and simply dismiss the accusations made by Silicon Knights. For those of you who haven’t been following this here’s the summary. Silicon Knights has a conspiracy theory that Epic isn’t holding up it’s side of the deal with those developers who have licensed the Unreal Engine. Silicon Knights is now demanding to know what Epic’s version of the Unreal Engine has that makes Gears Of War work better than another games using the licensed technology, like say, Too Human. Epic in turn tried to dismiss the accusations with a counterclaim, which Silicon Knights then countered.
Today we’ve found out that the move to dismiss the lawsuit has been denied, which means the two developers will have to settle this in a courtroom. Epic’s Mark Reign still isn’t worried though, and remains confident that the accusations are still unfounded.
“[The Judge] put the discovery process in motion, which will allow the lawsuits to move forward. Epic had asked for the entire case to be dismissed. Judge Dever denied this request, which is not unusual. Often these requests are denied. It is important to note that this was not a decision on the merits of Silicon Knights’ claims. We are confident that the evidence will show Silicon Knights breached its license with Epic Games and violated our copyrights and trade secrets.”
This battle is going to get very ugly. We will continue to keep you informed as more news comes in.
Tags: Articles, Business, News
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:59 pm
silicon knights do have a case i would think, i have also wondered why some games using the same engines dont look as similar as others do.
November 3rd, 2007 at 4:45 pm
A game engine isn’t the only thing that makes a game look good it’s usually the art/models and usually some kind of tweaking of the engine to work for the type of game you’re trying to create.
Epic created the engine so who would know better than them how to get things just right for their game. Although not offering enough support for their engine for the licensees breaks their contract, they shouldn’t have to give away all their secrets to how they made a game because that’s their competitive edge.
On the face of it, although Silicon Knights it seems weren’t provided with all the support they were probably entitled to, from the trailers I’ve seen the problem isn’t that they didn’t have enough support but that their animation looks really dodgy and that’s something no technical support can fix.
January 29th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
[...] seems that the worlds been getting a bit tired of with Unreal Engine 3 on consoles lately. It doesn’t help that PC gamers have Crysis. If [...]