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Silicon Knights Files Lawsuit Against Epic

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  • sonic
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    sonic polycounter lvl 18
    I don't think companies will band together for a class action lawsuit, because typically a class action lawsuit is when a group of people with similar complaints band together to fight against a common problem, not when a group of companies have a similar problem. One of the main reasons for a class action lawsuit is to distribute the legal costs amongst the whole group and maintaining a single, definitive goal. Each of these companies can most likely easily afford legal help, and since they are all in different situations, it probably would not be in their best interest to all sue for the exact same thing.
  • Toomas
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    Toomas polycounter lvl 18
    Class action or not, doest really matter but if SK wins in court then all the other companies with similar problems can pretty much just file it too and win for sure. If there a lot of them the it could possibly mean Epic going under.
  • killingpeople
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    killingpeople polycounter lvl 18
  • Daz
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    Daz polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    I don't think companies will band together for a class action lawsuit, because typically a class action lawsuit is when a group of people with similar complaints band together to fight against a common problem, not when a group of companies have a similar problem. One of the main reasons for a class action lawsuit is to distribute the legal costs amongst the whole group and maintaining a single, definitive goal. Each of these companies can most likely easily afford legal help, and since they are all in different situations, it probably would not be in their best interest to all sue for the exact same thing.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    What sonic said. Class action lawsuits cant get filed on behalf of a bunch of different companies, that's not their purpose. Their plaintiffs are individuals.

    There seems very little point in arguing the ins and outs of this case without decent info imho. But I agree that it's a very important case. I can't think of many other industries in which a company sells tools to rival companies for the purpose of making a competing product. The phrase 'conflict of interests' springs to mind here and it seems to be a pretty unique situation.
  • Jesse Moody
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    Jesse Moody polycounter lvl 17
    Yeah it does seem like a conflict of interest BUT it does bring a lot of money into the studio and cuts the cost of their own development and expenses I would think. With the price of UE3 and how many people have licensed it I would think Epic could afford a better support staff for the engine department.

    I don't know. It is all a huge mess and I just hope it gets straightened out.
  • Mark Dygert
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    I wonder if this will split Epic into two companies, engine development and game development.
  • killingpeople
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    killingpeople polycounter lvl 18
    why would they do that? .. so only one would be held responsible of any claims favored to silicon knights?
  • Penzer
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    Penzer polycounter lvl 17
    [ QUOTE ]
    why would they do that? .. so only one would be held responsible of any claims favored to silicon knights?

    [/ QUOTE ]

    If they were to do that, it would eliminate the conflict of interest, or atleast it would have if it were done a long time ago.

    Part of the reason that studios do make their own engine, tools, tech and coffee, is because they know what they need. If Epic had been two different companies, would the engine making company have made as good of an engine? By Epic having real development experience with their own software, they can make it much better than an external company could.
  • rooster
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    rooster mod
    hmm plenty of other companies licensed quake 3 and ut 2kwhatever before this though right? this seems different to the usual case of engine lease
  • poopinmymouth
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    poopinmymouth polycounter lvl 19
    [ QUOTE ]
    why would they do that? .. so only one would be held responsible of any claims favored to silicon knights?

    [/ QUOTE ]

    No, so that a separate company won't use licensing money for anything but support for the engine the money is being paid out for.

    It would be one thing if Epic said, pay our license fee, and you get whatever it is that we do for our games, take it or leave it. It might require lots of work on your part to make your own game out of it, but that's tough, this will at least get you a leg up on a lot of areas. However, it seems more like they say: Here is an awesome, very flexible engine, that we will support you with, because of the vast sums of money you've paid us. We will provide: this, this, and this.

    The problem comes when they take the money from licensees, promise certain types of support, and then rather than providing it, spend all their time working on GoW and UT2k7, rather than offer the promised support. (this is SK claim anyway, I'm not saying they are/aren't) If they've promised support, and not delivered, they absolutely deserve to lose, whether Too Human is a crappy game or not.

    If they had a separate company for the engine support, it would most likely make sure that those people are only ever used to support the engine towards the paying licensees, and their paid for time wouldn't be taken away for Epic game products.

    poop.gif
  • oXYnary
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    oXYnary polycounter lvl 18
    As far as splitting the engine into another product and company. Do you all think this would help or hurt the unreal engine development?

    My own theory is that since as game developers they use it everyday to actually create games, they can be that much quicker integrating features and workflow that pure game engine companies usually take much longer. They also have the ability to work with Mod creators where many engine companies leave that up to the license. Whether that be as pure engine companies, a separate stripped down version that they sell separately, or simply not allowing the tools in the hands of consumers.

    I good compromise would seem to point to Epic needing if nothing else, a much larger support staff 24/7 for the engine that are totally separate individuals from those working on Epic titles, but the ability to push the actual engine programmers to get functionality in quickly for specific clients?

    As your quick to remind me, I am not in the industry, so I could be totally off. So inquiring minds want to know!
  • Ferg
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    Ferg polycounter lvl 17
    Shacknews interviewed other developers who were using the unreal3 engine around the same time SK was, and they've posted an article covering their responses. Link and full text... right... NOW

    http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=468



    Last week the internet--or at least the video game-related parts of it--exploded when Epic Games quietly announced that it had been sued by developer Silicon Knights. That quiet announcement quickly turned into a frenzy as the full text of the lawsuit surfaced. To recap, the Too Human developer claimed Epic had failed to deliver versions of the licensed Unreal Engine 3 by its contractual deadline, resulting in demonstrable damage to the reputation of Silicon Knights and Too Human.
    After the news broke, Shacknews contacted several developers with personal Unreal Engine experience. The developers spoke on topics such as their reactions to the lawsuit, their studios' track records with the tech, and their own opinions on Epic's level of support. Opinions ranged from positive to negative, though negative responses tended not to hold Epic to the same level of fault as does Silicon Knights' suit. Understandably, some respondents chose to remain anonymous, though Shacknews vouches for their authenticity.

    "UE3 helped me get my shit done."
    Josh Jeffcoat, a former Gearbox Software level designer who worked with Unreal Engine 3, admitted that during his tenure at Gearbox--which, notably, ended last May--the package had its issues, but that none of them kept his team from exploiting the engine to great effect. Significantly to this lawsuit, he did not feel Epic deliberately acted outside of developers' interests.

    "UE3 isn't perfect by any means, but I don't feel Epic misrepresented it in any way when we licensed it," said Jeffcoat. "It's not that UE3 is the best at any one thing it does, because it's not. It's just better at more of them than anything else, and the ten-plus years of maturity it's been through has yielded a better-than-average art and design pipeline. I've heard plenty of tirades and I've given a few of them myself, but at the end of the day, UE3 helped me get my shit done. And it did a better job than any tool set I'd used before."

    Jeffcoat also commented more directly on the situation at hand. "I am unable to account for the engine's current status, but as I left, I was aware of several of UE3's limitations--the lighting model is dog slow for anything dynamic, the streaming support has issues; I believe SK mentioned these--but most of these were apparent from the day we first got the code, and we designed accordingly," he explained. "The almost gratuitous level of flexibility in other areas allowed us to accomplish a great deal, even without additional code."

    "It just wasn't the best releationship for us."
    Independent Postal series developer Running With Scissors has worked with Epic engines in its past games, but elected not to licensed UE3 for Postal III. Product manager Mike Jaret cited his company's experience with the licensor as the reasoning for the change.

    "Epic does make a great product and while I don't hold anything against Epic personally, we are a small indie developer and we are at the mercy of the licensor," said Jaret. "It just wasn't the best relationship for us."

    Running With Scissors has licensed Valve's Source engine for its upcoming Postal III.

    "Epic was very late in delivering key features."
    A programmer at a major developer working with Unreal Engine 3 corroborated Silicon Knights' claims that important parts of the engine came to developers late, which caused problems for his team. However, he also countered Silicon Knights' claims that Epic held back features deliberately, pointing out his belief that Epic was testing and polishing the features by implementing them into a real-world setting in its own game. The source also claimed that Epic was honest about its doings.

    "It is true that Epic was very late in delivering key features to UE3 during the development of Gears of War," he said. "They had promised one of the most important feature of UE3, the multi-threaded renderer, many many months before it was finally delivered. Since the key to having fast performances on the Xbox 360 is multi-threading, it made the engine somewhat subpar if you wanted to run your game with good graphics on a console."


    On Epic's tardiness: "I can understand why some features were delivered late to the UE3 licensees. Some of them were very complex while others would cause a ton of headaches to licencees if they were unstable or unfinished. This was also the reason why GoW had some UE3 features implemented and tested first before they were introduced to the official codebase. There is no better way to know if your stuff works. The Epic programmers were always upfront about the situation and never hid themselves or stopped answering questions to licensees."

    On his team's experiences: "In our case, we ended up having to choose between shipping late or implementing the missing features ourselves. We chose the latter, because we had the talent and the resources to do so, but it did add many more programmers--and work hours--than what we had initially planned. It also greatly soured the reputation of UE3 within [our company], a reputation that was already not very high because of the high licensing cost of UE3."

    "We have found Epic to be an extraordinary partner"
    Some developers claimed to have had no rocky roads with Epic or its tech, and were happy to come on the record to say so. Independent studio Chair Entertainment Group, currently working on the Xbox Live Arcade game Undertow and the multi-medium property Empire, uses UE3 for all its projects. Chair's Laura Heeb Mustard commented on the situation.

    "We have been following the news of this lawsuit since it broke," Heeb responded last week. "Our team has been working with Unreal technology for several years and have been using Unreal Engine 3 exclusively for the past two years. We have found Epic to be an extraordinary partner and the UE3 engine to be exceptional. Epic has always been very supportive of our efforts and their technology has been instrumental in allowing our company to develop high quality products."

    Lending support to SK--with a caveat
    One developer source with firsthand knowledge of Unreal Engine 3 development, who preferred not be quoted directly, corroborated allegations from Silicon Knights that certain features were late in being delivered to licensees. He also pointed to several other studios of varying levels of experience--which he requested be kept nameless--which had seen trouble with the engine. However, the source noted his belief that these difficulties were not due to intentionally malicious action on the part of Epic, but rather a partial byproduct of Epic's own workforce being divided between development on the engine and its own internal projects.

    Furthermore, the developer lent support to Silicon Knights' allegations that the PlayStation 3 version of UE3 has under-delivered in terms of Epic's original claims, with the significant divergence between Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware contributing to the issue. Such concerns may have prompted Sony's recent announcement of an agreement with Epic to optimize UE3 for PS3 development.

    Finally, the source speculated that a significant factor behind Silicon Knights' legal action may be the expense the studio has put into its own modifications of Unreal Engine 3--in most situations, such modifications would remain with the owner of the engine itself, but if Silicon Knights performed significant alterations for what it calls "The Silicon Knights Engine," it likely wants to keep them in-house.

    Shacknews spoke with a number of other developers who declined to go on the record, some of whom had additional negative experiences and some of whom simply did not wish to comment on the situation.
  • spacemonkey
  • Jesse Moody
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    Jesse Moody polycounter lvl 17
    Well it's now going back to them. Epic is suing SK.

    Read about it here..

    http://www.gamespot.com/news/6176435.htm...estnews;title;1
  • Hito
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    Hito interpolator
    SK comes back swinging

    http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=17099

    bring out the ring girls!
  • arshlevon
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    arshlevon polycounter lvl 18
    hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... who is publishing too human again???
    isn't it someone who would be pissed at epic for 2k7 being a ps3 exclusive for several months?
    and where does an indy developer broken and destroyed from not being able to use the ue3 engine get all the money for a full on legal battle with epic.. you know its costing them a ton.
    this stinks something rotten to me..
  • flaagan
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    flaagan polycounter lvl 18
    Not to be taken seriously, but I'm all for epic getting bitchslapped if a ps3-owning gimp is gonna get his hands on 2k7 before a pc owner. tongue.gif
  • Tulkamir
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    Tulkamir polycounter lvl 18
    I'm pretty sure MS wouldn't want to piss Epic off right now Arsh, so I doubt that's the case. Silicon Knights is a well established company, I doubt funding is that elusive.

    Heck, I'd not be surprised if MS in some form supported the delay of UT3. If it were to come out in fall it'd have been directly competing with Halo 3, which would have likely dwarfed it's release. Makes more sense to wait till later when it's got less competition and can sell more.
  • Jesse Moody
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    Jesse Moody polycounter lvl 17
    ummm isn't ut2007 releasing for PC this fall at the same time as the PS3 version. It was the 360 version that was delayed. So I don't think Microsoft has anything to do with this.

    From what SK has said previously about modifying the engine and making it "their" own does sound fishy.
  • Tulkamir
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    Tulkamir polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    ummm isn't ut2007 releasing for PC this fall at the same time as the PS3 version. It was the 360 version that was delayed. So I don't think Microsoft has anything to do with this.

    From what SK has said previously about modifying the engine and making it "their" own does sound fishy.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    UT3 (No such thing as 2k7 anymore by the way) was only delayed on 360, yea. And MS did have something to do with the official reason, in a round about way. Epic is claiming it's due to problems with MS's restrictions on user made content on XBL, and epic's need to find a work around so mods can make their way to the 360. Most likely true. I'm only saying that I doubt MS is that pissed off about it, as in the long run it will likely not be that detrimental to them.
  • Jesse Moody
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    Jesse Moody polycounter lvl 17
    oh yeah UT3...keep forgetting...yeah i don't think MS really cares with Halo 3 coming and all the other crazy games...Bioshock, Assassins Creed....
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