Epic Games being sued for "faulty" Unreal Engine 3
- July 20, 2007 10:28 AM PST
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Silicon Knights on Thursday said it's suing Epic Games for lost revenues caused by Unreal Engine 3, the popular developer platform that they claim has delayed the release of Too Human on Xbox 360. Epic called the allegations "unfounded."
Epic's Gears of War for Xbox 360
The lawsuit against Epic states that the widely used Unreal Engine 3 "did not work as Epic represented it would and, moreover, Epic has been unable or unwilling to fix it."
Silicon Knights goes on to say that Epic "never intended to deliver Unreal Engine 3 as a fully functional game engine as promised," and that Epic merely licensed the engine to collect fees from developers in order to fund its own development of Gears of War on 360.
"We have had extensive problems with the Unreal Engine 3 that Epic has been unwilling or unable to rectify," Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack said in a statement. "For more than a year, we have been trying to reach an agreement with Epic to resolve these issues without resorting to litigation, but were unable to come to reasonable terms with Epic. Regrettably, we are now forced to go to court in order to achieve satisfaction. We remain hopeful, however, that we can reach a reasonable business resolution with Epic at some point."
The lawsuit demands Epic "to disgorge all profits obtained on its Gears of War game as a result of the misconduct."
Epic Vice President Mark Rein responded by saying, "This morning we were served with a lawsuit by Silicon Knights. 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 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," Rein added.
Too Human was originally in development for PlayStation back in 1999. The game was then shifted to GameCube and has since moved to Xbox 360 due to a 2005 agreement between Silicon Knights and Microsoft. While originally intended to be developed using Unreal Engine 3, Too Human is now being developed on an internal engine.
There are close to 50 games currently scheduled to use Epic's Unreal Engine 3, including Unreal Tournament 3, BioShock, Mass Effect, Lineage III, Lost Odyssey, BlackSite: Area 51, and Turok to name a few.
