14 DAY TRIAL // Many next-gen games today use Epic's Unreal Engine 3. It's the case with Silicon Knights and their upcoming action-adventure title, Too Human. Silicon signed a license agreement with the developers of Gears of War to use their UE3 for developing Too Human for the PS3. Under the terms of the agreement, Epic was prompted to produce the proper PS3 support and code for their Engine. Apparently, they failed to do that in the 6 months they had at their disposal, and so Silicon is now suing them.
"Rather than provide support to Silicon Knights and Epic's other many licensees of the Engine, Epic intentionally and wrongfully has used the fees from those licenses to launch its own game to widespread commercial success while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games," reads the document, as I found via 1UP.com.
Obviously, the developers of Too Human have dropped Epic's Engine, focusing on something of their own, which they plan to call the Silicon Knighs Engine. Here's what the lawsuit reads further on: "Epic has breached its Agreement with Silicon Knights yet again by missing the six-month deadline for release of an Engine that works on the Playstation 3. Final development kits for that console were released in and around mid-August, 2006, making the functional Engine due to Silicon Knights in February, 2007. Silicon Knights has received no such Engine from Epic."
Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack originally wrote: "We would rather spend our time focusing on making great games, but as stated in our complaint, Epic simply refuses to acknowledge the inadequacies of the Unreal Engine 3 code it provides to its licensees and refuses to accept the fact that its code has caused serious damage not only to Silicon Knights, but a number of other developers in the industry."
Epic's Mark Rein obviously disagreed and stated the following: "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."
My guess is that if Epic really had something to say in their defense, they'd have said it. Then again, who knows, maybe it's Epic who's right about the whole deal. We'll keep you updated as soon as we hear anything new.
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