Star Citizen Breaking News

[Flashwit]

Being sued by Crytek eh? I thought they bought complete access to the engine source and could do whatever they wanted to with it?

[dsmart]

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/940988268572807168

Star Citizen backers now have a choice to make. 1) Dig deep & continue to fund a failed venture 2) ask questions about the money or 3) pull out and get a refund.

What choice will you make?

It's here. It's bad. And it's only going to get worse.

Stay tuned.

CryTek has followed through on its threat to sue RSI/CIG for a litany of things, and have hired one of the best law firms in the US. The suit is led by this guy.

The lawsuit is currently up on PACER, but doesn't show as being served yet. They are claiming, among other things, IP infringement, breach of contract, and royalties (on the $170m raised) due to them.

I am currently working through an article about it which will provide more details from the filing. It's as serious as can be, as they are alleging they switched engines to avoid paying them.

Developing story. Stay tuned.

[dsmart]

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/940988268572807168

Star Citizen backers now have a choice to make. 1) Dig deep & continue to fund a failed venture 2) ask questions about the money or 3) pull out and get a refund.

What choice will you make?

It's here. It's bad. And it's only going to get worse.

Stay tuned.

CryTek has followed through on its threat to sue RSI/CIG for a litany of things, and have hired one of the best law firms in the US. The suit is led by this guy.

The lawsuit is currently up on PACER, but doesn't show as being served yet. They are claiming, among other things, IP infringement, breach of contract, and royalties (on the $170m raised) due to them.

I am currently working through an article about it which will provide more details from the filing. It's as serious as can be, as they are alleging they switched engines to avoid paying them.

Developing story. Stay tuned.

The lawsuit is online

https://www.scribd.com/document/367101474/Crytek-v-CIG

[Greggy_D]

Backers should be outraged their money is not going towards development, but to defending and/or settling this lawsuit.  But they won't be.  They'll somehow justify that Crytek = Bad and CIG = Good.

[AncoGaming]

This looks bad, really bad.

I've been saying 'don't fuck with the Germans' for years now and that's exactly my point.

CIG are also being sued at the European court right now because their useless customer service thought they can tell a (German) guy waiting for 24000$ that they find it unnecessary to further escalate things... LOL...

They also thought, apparently, let's just build a studio at Frankfurt without asking anyone, almost in walking distance from CryTek, sack all their good employees and live happily ever after. Not only will the case which CryTek have been preparing for more than a year now absolutely D E S T R O Y CIG, it will force them to show where the hell 173 million $ went, where it came from, and I mean exactly, every cent of it, those attorneys will follow every single transaction and receipt no matter how long it takes them.

Once those dudes let go off Roberts, he will never ever even think of making a game again, that's for sure, and soon you can buy the designer handbag of his wife from eBay for 30$, signed with kisses. 

[Motto]

Guys, isn't it obvious? Clearly CIG was able to do things with CryEngine that CryTek only could dream of. So, this is their way to get their own engine back, upgraded and enhanched and all. It's a brilliant move. Now Chris will get Amazon involved as well, because Amazon doesn't want to lose the benefits of the enhancements made by CIG as well. How can you not see this? Clrearly you don't know anything about game development. Derek is just spreading FUD. Again!

[dsmart]

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[Kyrt]

Being sued by Crytek eh? I thought they bought complete access to the engine source and could do whatever they wanted to with it?

Part of the deal they made was to

1: Keep the source code private and not share it.
They shared it with third parties and displayed it to the public during their regularly scheduled broadcatss sucjh as BugSmashers

2: They were only supposed to use it for one game - Star Citizen
They are using it for two - Star Citizen and S42. It doesn't matter that they sued to be one.

3: They were supposed to promote the CryTek brand and protect its copyrights
CIG removed copyright notices and CryTek branding and changed the name of CryEngine to StarEngine. Doesn't matter how much of it is changed since legally it is still a variant of CryEngine

4: They were obligated to make use of only CryEngine
CIG have made a big deal of their switch to Lumberyard.

They bought the use of CE at a discount in exchange for promotion, and had the right to modify it to suit their game. If the GLA says what CT says its says, CIG appear to have no legs to stand on. One must always be wary of how the courts will rule, especially when we have incomplete information and only one side of the story (so far) but...it doesn't look good.

CIG could conceivably lose the right to use CryEngine and they may still be legally unable to use Lumberyard. Or maybe even any other engine.

[Kyrt]

The lawsuit is online

https://www.scribd.com/document/367101474/Crytek-v-CIG

Is this what your two week countdown was referring to?

[Motto]

The best defence for Chris now would be to admit that there is no separate SQ42 game and never has been, so there is no second game to pay license fees for. He'll probably argue that that is why there hasn't been made any progress on SQ42, simply because he reacted directly when prompted on the first e-mail from CryTek about it. He just forgot to e-mail that back...

Doesn't really help him though. Admitting nothing done on SQ42 will get him killed by the last remaining backers. And since Sandi was VP of Marketing, dumping all assets and money on her and then divorcing her won't help either.

I'm guessing al lot of big industry names are at least smiling now, if not laughing out loud.

[Greggy_D]

Ummm...he's charging a completely separate fee for SQ42.  His unbridled greed by decoupling SQ42 from SC is part of what is going to do him in.

[Motto]

Asking money for something that isn't there might be illegal or not, but is no ground to pay CryTek. You don't pay for what you don't use.

[N0mad]

The desperate cash grab of the land sale all makes sense now - CIG knew this was coming.

It's the worst possible scenario for CIG, this isn't some inconsequential 3rd party developer suing them for some cash. This is CryTek their original partner and engine maker. This is bad PR on an exponentially worse scale than the land sale fiasco. It's gone viral on Reddit and now several game media sites are running the story - that's just within a few hours of Derek's first tweet. As Derek has (also) tweeted, if CIG could have thrown money at the problem to keep it quiet the they would have done so before now - they can't. Nobody is going to buy a JPEG while this is going on. This is a full on run-and-get-a-refund Extinction Level Event.   :supaburn:

[Greggy_D]

And it all started nearly two years ago.  Early 2016 is when Crytek told CIG to knock it the fuck off.  CIG gave them the middle finger instead and now here we are.

[Bubba]

Yeah. This does put a whole new twist on why the IP was unnamed in the Coutts loan. I'm assuming they'll want to be paid back right quick to avoid a knock-on effect. Plus, with blood in the water, there's the question: which creditors get to be first in line?

And incidentally, about Clive's post, I guess my misunderstand is more that I disagree with your assessment, Derek. In the quote, Clive blames Animations, FLCS (or whatever pseudo-avionics they use), Models and something like "Entity Updates" for the problems. The most charitable way to interpret that is him saying it's not bad netcode, it's the fact that nothing in the game was ever budgeted for multiplayer.
So if you take him at his word, even if he is wrong, things are worse: it isn't something as simple as bad net transport. It's something as simple as those in power over this thing did not deem multiplayer important enough to give it a role in design decisions, and as a result, the game and engine explode in multiplayer situations, and it's not something that cleaning up the crappy netcode will fix.