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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @02:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the cry-moar dept.

As if Star Citizen didn't have enough problems, now its developers are being sued by Crytek:

Star Citizen's lengthy and heavily crowd-funded development has been marked by numerous changes to the project's direction and scope, including a move from Crytek's CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard in late 2016. That change is now the focus of a lawsuit from Crytek, which accuses Star Citizen developers Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for Central California, lays out how RSI agreed to work exclusively with CryEngine in a 2012 agreement, an agreement it says was broken when RSI moved to Amazon's Lumberyard engine in late 2016.

In a blog post following that transition, RSI's Chris Roberts explained that Lumberyard was essentially a more promising fork of an earlier CryEngine build that fit better as a base for "StarEngine," his name for the "heavily modified" version of CryEngine the developers were then using. "Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are," Roberts wrote.

Previously: Star Citizen Reaches $100 Million in Crowdfunding, Alpha 2.0 Released


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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday December 15 2017, @07:28PM

    by zocalo (302) on Friday December 15 2017, @07:28PM (#610408)
    If you read the complaint, that was kind of what Crytek claim they were trying to do. According to Crytek, in return for a budget priced license for a single game CIG was supposed to help them promote their engine (by using it and through prominent display of the Crytek logo on startup), develop new features for the engine, and do joint promotional events. They did do some of the latter at a few tradeshows and other events, but very little - if any - of the rest happened. CIG is now developing two separate games (although depending on what was done when, SQ42 might only ever have been a Lumberyard based-product), definitely didn't display the Crytek logo very prominently, and the co-operation and contributions of code clearly stopped when they switched engines. Something else that the license supposedly forbade them to do.

    It all hinges on the contractual terms of the license - which we currently only have via Crytek's claims - but if CIG has committed at least some some of the breaches that Crytek is claiming they have, and trying to work it out internally has presumably failed to come to terms, then Crytek only really have one course of action left for relief, and that's the courts. You can hardly blame them for taking this route if that is indeed the case. Either way, the only winners here are going to be the lawyers, and I don't think that's going to go over to well with those that still support the project if they think their pledges are being spent on that rather than the moneypit of SC/SQ42. Potentially CIG are going to have to bring in external counsel as well - while CIG's in-house lawer and co-founder, Orten Freyermuth, is qualified to represent them in this, he's also intimately involved in the case and only an idiot represents himself in court, lawyers included.

    I think we can expect a lot of ugly articles and comments on this, so the smart thing to do stock up on popcorn and get ready for the show.
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