EPIC sued over incomplete Unreal Engine 3

[Semitry]

So up until today I thought UE3 would be responsible for like 50% of today's next generation games. But guess I was wrong. Silicon Knights suing EPIC due to incomplete engine, withholding features of the engine that they used on Gears of War and lack of support.

link

Only 2 UE3 games have been released, Roboblitz and Gears of War. Rainbow 6 is based off a modified UE2.5 and all UE3 games have been delayed, and none of the GRAW games use it (I thought UE3 for all).

[Exoduso]

It would be pretty funny if Square didn't acquire the full engine either..

[aurik]

Will probably settle out of court for an undisclosed sum.

[Hitoshura]

That sucks I really hope it doesn't effect any other games in development. Is this really legit? Kotaku has to be the least reliable and credited source of anything on the internet.

[SephYuyX]

Kotaku has to be the least reliable and credited source of anything on the internet.

I find this to be the complete opposite.

[Xavier]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6175386...stnews;title;0

Apparently Epic has been pretty shady with the engine and support to the people they license it to use. Who knows, two sides to every story, but Silicon seems pretty angry. Article said they basically had to spend a ton of time and money creating their own game engine after Epic failed to provide a fully working/compatible UE3 engine. If Gears of War is any indication, the Unreal Engine 3 is really good, and obviously a gigantic money/time saver for developers on next-gen consoles.

What really amazes me is that Microsoft basically had Epic in its pocket, and Silicon Knights was developing this hyped game for the 360, so I don't understand how they would let something like this happen.

[draxyl]

Well, the bottom line is that Microsoft doesn't have any sort of controlling interest in Epic...so Epic could have fed them any line of bullshit they wanted about their licensees and the status of UE3. MS was much more concerned about getting Gears out, because it's been nothing but gold since it shipped - one of the few certifiable 3rd party hits for the 360.

SK does certainly have a bit of history bitching & moaning & pointing fingers, and I certainly don't trust what Dyack says....but the weight of other UE3 games all being delayed is certainly hard to argue with. I'm not sure the suit has much of a leg to stand on concerning the PS3 issues, as a degree of that is out of Epic's hands and everyone in the industry knows how devilishly hard it is to code/optimize things on the PS3. The overall engine complaints, however, do seem to have some merit. I particularly like the part about Epic using all the licensing fee's to fund Gears development...though, I certainly think Epic had the cash flow during development to fund Gears on their own.

I do think it is likely that between Gears & Unreal3 that they were spread too thin to fulfill their contractual obligations to UE3 licensees...I definitely could see managers re-tasking developers over to optimizations for both games, instead of continuing development for the licensed version of the engine. That said, Epic will settle this out of court if SK will let them...definitely in their best interest to get these allegations behind them. They'll probably lose a bit of licensing business from it all, but I don't think they'll lose that much...who else are people going to turn to? id engines are notoriously not as friendly to develop on. Crytek maybe, but they're not located in NA...they're in Germany. Tho, the Germans do have a history of making good engines

[Exoduso]

Isn't Square supposed to use the unreal3 engine for Versus 13?

[Semitry]

Isn't Square supposed to use the unreal3 engine for Versus 13?

No, white engine. Last Remnants is using UE3 i think.

[Ace-o-fire]

Isn't Square supposed to use the unreal3 engine for Versus 13?

No, white engine. Last Remnants is using UE3 i think.

yep it is.

Better for multiple persons in battle, and last remnants is about big scale battles.