Silicon Knights' suit continues, Epic motion denied

by Ross Miller { Nov 1st 2007 at 11:10AM }

Epic Games' motion for dismissal against the Silicon Knights' lawsuit has been denied. Both parties in the lawsuit told GameDaily told that the lawsuit will move forward.

"Often these requests are denied," said Epic VP Mark Rein. "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."

Epic had filed the motion to dismissal alongside a countersuit against Silicon Knights over what it sees as an attempt by the Too Human developer to "take Epic's Licensed Technology, pay nothing for it, and use it any way it pleases." The fate of the counterclaim is unknown.

No court date has been set. The lawsuit filed by Silicon Knights claims Epic providing an inadequate Unreal Engine 3 and for providing insufficient support, causing SK's Too Human considerable delay. Given the proliferation of Unreal Engine 3 licensees in the industry right now, we're eagerly waiting to see the list of witnesses called to testify.

Tags: epic, epic-games, mark-rein, silicon-knights, too-human, unreal, unreal-engine, unreal-engine-3

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

gonk @ Nov 1st 2007 11:24AM

silicon is sueing epic for selling them a faulty product

and epic is sueing silicon for not paying

which is it? did they pay or not? wtf

MegaSnort @ Nov 1st 2007 11:25AM

I'm predicting that Ken Levine or someone else from Irrational Games is going to be a witness. Mark Rein will introduce Bioshock as evidence, tells Dyack "lrn2program, QQ more n00b".

F. Rocker or Fernando R.? @ Nov 1st 2007 11:26AM

Off Topic:

I hate Mark Rein.

Phranctoast @ Nov 1st 2007 11:28AM

Epic can bring witnesses that have successfully utilized UE3 in their games. There are a couple right now.

Too Human has been in limbo since 1999. Blaming Epic for this disaster of a game seems rediculous.

EihBeir @ Nov 1st 2007 11:34AM

Go get 'em, SK!

Ex-S @ Nov 1st 2007 11:43AM

Eh, not really.

Epic could be breaching their contract by not providing all the things that they were contractually obligated to do. The companies that do have UE3 based games might've sucked it up and just hired more guys in-house to get it working but but it looks like Silicon Knights is a pissed off enough about to go the next step.

There's certainly other UE3 based games that were eventually canceled to give the suit some credence.

Jake @ Nov 1st 2007 11:42AM

I just hope Too Human comes out alright out of this. The hands on impressions are very positive. The story looks intriguing. And I just love RPG's with non-boring ass combat in general, which this looks to be.

And I seem to remember a certain original IP that SK came out with that was frakin' awesome.

flameofdoom666 @ Nov 1st 2007 8:34PM

I loved Eternal Darkness too :-)

flameofdoom666 @ Nov 1st 2007 8:34PM

I loved Eternal Darkness too :-)

flameofdoom666 @ Nov 1st 2007 8:36PM

I loved Eternal Darkness too :-)

flameofdoom666 @ Nov 1st 2007 8:36PM

Sorry! This replying system is sooo bad!

DangerMouse @ Nov 1st 2007 11:46AM

Metal gear solid on the gamecube ran like shit compared to MGS2 on the PS2, even though they were supposedly working with better hardware. There product isn't coming out as they envisioned, and they're looking for someone to blame. I'm somewhat convinced that dyack and SK don't know what they're doing.

Jake @ Nov 1st 2007 12:11PM

"I don't think SK knows what they are doing"

http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2007/10/17/too-human-impressions-roll-in/

People who have played recent builds say it is shaping up to be very good. These guys also made Eternal Darkness, so they aren't totally clueless. MS published games have also had an outstanding track record on the 360.

Fanboys have to bite the bullet and realize that, barring some crazy legal intervention, this game is going to be pretty good. How could a game in development for 15 years not be good? I kid.

Count Noobula @ Nov 1st 2007 1:48PM

@ Jake: We'll have to see how good 15 years of development is after Duke Nukem Forever comes out.

FidliousWong @ Nov 1st 2007 2:03PM

Jake, we all know Eternal Darkness was a good designed game. But go back and play it. Performance wise, it stutters and jumps frames. Animation cycles start and stop abruptly. Collision detection was horrid. And once you got especially effect heavy, even the sound started to stutter.

Eternal Darkness was a good design, but the execution was shit. Even Silicon Knights very first game ever, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, had huge performance issues. A top down 2D action RPG when Diablo was king and this thing ran like a licensed game on SNES.

mat @ Nov 1st 2007 5:32PM

Fid: get your facts straight, SK made Cyber Empires back in 1992 which was a fucking awesome game.

mat @ Nov 1st 2007 5:35PM

Fid: get your facts straight, SK made Cyber Empires back in 1992
which was a freaking awesome game.

Mr Khan @ Nov 1st 2007 9:40PM

When it gets right down to it, Silicon Knights IS a good developer, they just take forever, and Dennis Dyack is always bitching about something

That's they have that unnatractive aura

NATO_Duke @ Nov 1st 2007 11:53AM

Not a shock that a motion to dismiss would be denied. Generally, in Illinois at least, they are hard to get. If the theory you press is that the complaint fails to show a cause of action (615 motion)- the court will allow the plaintiff to amend it to fix the problem. The other theories for dismissal (under 619) are much more obvious and would not likely come into play here (ie: laches, estoppel, res judica, etc). Here they are called 615 & 619 motions. A 615 is a waste of time, and a 619 is hard to get granted.

Basically, a motion to dismiss is done by most Defendants, and it rarely is a method to dispose of the case. The news will be in their motion for summary judgment - thats a much more interesting method of case disposal.

There is a dose of legal education for the day.

Todd @ Nov 1st 2007 12:05PM

This is pretty simple. Regardless of the "quality" of the product, if said product was never paid for to begin with than the use of said product is illegal.

dark54555 @ Nov 1st 2007 12:05PM

More explanation here:

http://lawofthegame.blogspot.com/2007/11/silicon-knights-v-epic-motion-to.html

stik_man @ Nov 1st 2007 12:12PM

i don't want to jump to conclusions, because basically there really isn't enough information being released to make a conclusive opinion.

I will say from having worked with the UT 2004 engine that it is basically a drag and drop environment. Not to say that you "Drag and Drop" but everything is already in place to simply add models, textures, meshes, Etc. with relative ease. If one needs something changed in the way of code. the script can be modified with relative ease as well. It gives developers more time to fix bugs and add cool features because they aren't messing around with base code all the time.

Now as I said I don't want to jump to conclusions, but it sounds to me that the engine hasn't been polished up yet. It seems somethings are missing, maybe certain areas of script aren't in place. maybe the physics engine isn't as integrated as it could be. What I'm saying is that the aforementioned "Drag and Drop" nature isn't as smooth as it should be. SK is probably having to mess a lot with the base code, and that always leads to problems (especially when it's not code that was developed in-house).

So SK is pissed because they have to mess with stuff they don't feel that they should have to, and I don't think that they should have to. On the other hand though, They [SK] have opted for bleeding edge technology, And when you buy into bleeding edge tech there are always associated risks involved.

I don't understand why SK would license an engine that they know still has quirks, and do it when they know the development house [Epic] is hard at work on 2 AAA titles. Of course there isn't gonna be the 24/7 support for an outside development company when the primary company [Epic] is devoting all their resources to the development of their own IPs. And as history has shown us The UT engine is an always growing and always evolving creature, so there are always going to be quirks involved.

These are the risks involved, at least from my perspective.

FidliousWong @ Nov 1st 2007 2:16PM

Okay, the case in a nutshell...

Silicon Knights alleges that Epic used the money licensing the Unreal Engine III to develop Gears of War rather than Unreal Engine III. This accusation comes from the fact that a much more stable build of UEIII came directly AFTER GoW was released. Anyone in software development knows you don't just develop software, it has to have a purpose and Gears of War, for all intents and purposes, was the tech demo for UEIII. It showcased the tech and allowed Epic to find the weaknesses in the tech in a realistic fashion. However, during the entire time of UEIII's development, current builds were freely available on a dedicated FTP 24/7 through Epic and stable builds thrown up every Friday. So on a day to day basis, you could literally WATCH Unreal Engine III being developed. But this fact is ignored by Silicon Knights and they allege they only had access to incomplete builds. The same incomplete builds every other licensee had access to.

Epic Games alleges that Silicon Knights wants to use Unreal Engine technology and trademark it as their own engine, thus being able to back completely out of their contractual obligation AND get a nifty bonus on top. Silicon Knights position is that they had to heavily modify the engine before it was usable for them in their development of Too Human. They want the heavily modified Unreal Engine based technology they wrote to be recognized as their own technology so they could essentially use it for free, license the tech out themselves, and as an added bonus, add a bit more favorable of a position in the full lawsuit. After all, if their modified work can be recognized as something entirely different from Unreal Engine, then the money they want is possible to achieve. But this position can best be described as such. If you use the sprites from Chrono Trigger to create an entirely new RPG, should SquareEnix then lose their right to sue you as you profit from THEIR work?

flameofdoom666 @ Nov 1st 2007 8:44PM

Wrong. They built their own engine from scratch. It is called the Silicon Knights Engine 2.0.

flameofdoom666 @ Nov 1st 2007 8:45PM

Wrong. They built their own engine from scratch. It is called the Silicon Knights Engine 2.0.

flameofdoom666 @ Nov 1st 2007 8:45PM

Wrong. They built their own engine from scratch. It is called the Silicon Knights Engine 2.0.

syco @ Nov 1st 2007 3:43PM

Well, I am completely rooting for SK on this one. IANAL, but it seems fairly clear that Epic has dropped the ball here, that they sold SK a license to an engine they MUST have known was ill suited to anything other than a very specific type of game and would require very specific, unavailable information (or a lot of hacking time and money) to modify it to usability for the variety of tasks they advertised it capable of out-of-box. This doesn't surprise me in the slightest, and I think it is great that SK is calling them on it.

Too @ Nov 1st 2007 6:14PM

I think Silicon Knights certainly has a valid case against Epic, and there's more than enough supporting evidence, should they decide to call in other developers or simply point to other major products based on the technology that have been mostly all delayed.

T2 @ Nov 1st 2007 6:29PM

"Silicon Knights alleges that Epic used the money licensing the Unreal Engine III to develop Gears of War rather than Unreal Engine III."

I thought Silicon Knights complaint was that Epic was not delivering on promised features in their engine by dates specified by Epic. As such delays by Epic, caused delays in development for Silicon Knights. And SK was alledging that Epic was favoring producing their own product (Gears of War) with enhancements in the engine over supplying enhancements to third parties. Because SK was basing their product on the technology they purchased from Epic, they were at the mercy of whenever Epic could deliver their product. Instead, it appears SK had to develop its own enhancements in the engine themselves or face the costly decision of starting over and building their own engine. If I'm not mistaken, other developers have had to enhance the engine on certain functions that were not or still not yet available.

flameofdoom666 @ Nov 1st 2007 8:47PM

You are correct as I understand it to be.

T-4 @ Nov 24th 2007 5:21PM

I can't believe people are on SK's side. Most of the time someone leases an engine, they don't pop it in verbatim and build a game on top of it. There is a lot of customization that goes on top of the base engine, and that's just what SK needs to do. As someone pointed out: while they have good games, they're often not very clean. Many, many people have licensed the unreal engines to make a game nothing like the unreal games.