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Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

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Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#21

Post by Godel_unicode »

59nadir wrote: post #20

Crytek is a useless company that's been looking to make a quick buck by any means possible since they stopped making games for real. You only have to look at their recent development with 'Crycash' for yet another example. This is just another attempt at keeping cash flow positive, not by making games but by any other means possible. I wouldn't be surprised to see news in a few months or half a year saying Crytek are…

Do you not consider making game engines and licensing their use to be a legitimate business model?

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#22

Post by TylerE »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #21
59nadir wrote: post #20

Crytek is a useless company that's been looking to make a quick buck by any means possible since they stopped making games for real. You only have to look at their recent development with 'Crycash' for yet another example. This is just another attempt at keeping cash flow positive, not by making games but by any other means possible. I wouldn't be surprised to see news in a few months or half a year saying Crytek are…

Do you not consider making game engines and licensing their use to be a legitimate business model?

Not especially?

Look at how the pricing has come down on UE4 and Unity.

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#23

Post by drawnwren »

didibus wrote: post #17
dsl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they can. They moved the bulk of the engine over to Lumberyard and publicly announced that, but under the hood are probably using the more mature CryEngine where Lumberyard is lacking. EDIT: It gets more confusing, Lumberyard is apparently a hard fork of CryEngine that Amazon paid for. My guess is they switched to Lumberyard for better licensing terms, but kept all the enhancements made to CryEngine post-fork.

Amazon also made enhancements to Lumberyard since though. Not sure why you'd call one more mature then the other. Do you have experience with both and can attest that Lumberyard now lacks behind the latest CryEngine?

This gets particularly weird when you consider the legal obligation to provide upstream patches to bugs. Are they now on the hook to patch Crytek with Lumberyard fixes?

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#24

Post by rtpg »

TylerE wrote: post #22
Godel_unicode wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not consider making game engines and licensing their use to be a legitimate business model?

Not especially? Look at how the pricing has come down on UE4 and Unity.

It's still their product? I don't see how price has anything to do with legitimacy of license agreements

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#25

Post by OhSoHumble »

bobsgame wrote: post #2

CryEngine is amazing technology and CryTek is a great company. I believe there must be merit to this. Star Citizen is also a very cool project and so I hope they work things out together. I want both companies to be very successful.

I would not describe CryTek as a great company; they've skipped out paying their employees numerous times.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/crytek-wage-crisis-black-sea-studio

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#27

Post by m_mueller »

tedivm wrote: post #18
m_mueller wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that CIG has relicensed under Lumberyard, is it possible that Crytek has a case here? I guess it depends on the contract, but I can't really imagine that CGI locked themselves into a contract to only ever use CryEngine for Star Citizen - wouldn't there have to be a specific clause that gives the dollar amount due in such a case that Star Citizen is either cancelled or switched to a different engine?

This wasn't a simple "we used this engine" type of deal- Crytek invested a lot in the kickstarter by supplying expertise and helping to build demos, and in return for that they promised to use the engine. This was meant to help promote Crytek as well, and that is why they invested in it. Specifically- > In that Agreement, Defendants promised, among other things, (i) to use the CryEngine game development platform excl…

My point is that, since the two are completely separate legal parties, shouldn't such contracts explicitely define what happens if a condition is not met? IANAL, but the way I see contracts, they can never really force people to do anything, instead it's a way to define opportunity costs as clearly as possible so there aren't any uncertainties on the table. It's like SLAs. Well, sure, you can guarantee me 5 nines or whatever - but if it's not defined what you owe me in case you don't make it, that guarantee is worthless to me because then all I can do is suing you and let a judge decide what's to happen after tons of legal expenses.

That's what I meant with my assumption that there should be some clear consequences already defined in the contract.

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#28

Post by lacker »

TylerE wrote: post #22
Godel_unicode wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not consider making game engines and licensing their use to be a legitimate business model?

Not especially? Look at how the pricing has come down on UE4 and Unity.

Well yes, but Unity is still a real company with a real business model, same as Crytek could be while only developing an engine.
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