Silicon Knights suing Epic Games
The Knights are out to defeat Epic Games for false and misleading statement! Apparently the game ran as smoothly as slugs on eggs shells in the XBox360 that they are pretty much fed up.
Last August, rumors spread that Silicon Knights was ditching Unreal Engine 3 for its long-awaited Xbox 360 game Too Human, because the frequently licensed game engine supposedly ran poorly on Microsoft’s console. Those rumors didn’t last too long before Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack squashed them in a statement, saying rumors of the group “completely scrapping” the engine were false.
Despite Dyack’s statement, those rumors appear to have been partially true, as revealed by Silicon Knights this week in a 54-page lawsuit it filed against Epic Games over Unreal Engine 3. In its complaint, the Ontario-based developer claims that it licensed the engine based on “false and misleading statements” from Epic. Silicon Knights said the Gears of War creator’s contractual breaches forced it to begin making its own game engine last May, just before an underwhelming public debut of the Unreal-powered Too Human at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
According to the suit, Epic “has caused Silicon Knights to experience considerable losses and ultimately has forced Silicon Knights to spend its limited time and resources on building its own game engine rather than in developing its video game.” It goes on to say that instead of supporting its licensing partners, Epic has used its fees to develop its own competing products “while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games.”
Epic Games fired off an e-mail to various press outlets this afternoon to address the suit. “This morning we were served with a lawsuit by Silicon Knights,” wrote Epic Games president Mark Rein. “We believe the claims against us are unfounded and without merit and we intend to fully defend against them. We’d love to tell you more about it but unfortunately our lawyers want us to save our comments for the courthouse so we’re going to do our best to comply with their wishes. In that vein we’d appreciate if our friends in the industry and media would refrain from asking us about the suit because we’re only going to say ‘no comment.’ We just wanted to share the news directly before the rumor mill starts churning.”
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