Star Citizen V. Crytek - Engine Maker Suing Cloud Imperium Games

Post by KostaAndreadis @ 01:29pm 14/12/17 | 12 Comments

With Crytek suing CIG for failing to live up to its end when using CryENGINE to power Star Citizen. The issue boils down to one license being supplied but then it being used across multiple titles - Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It goes further than that with mention of trademarks and other infringements. In its defense CIG notes that it stopped using CryENGINE a while ago.

"We are aware of the Crytek complaint having been filed in the US District Court. CIG hasn’t used the CryEngine for quite some time since we switched to Amazon’s Lumberyard. This is a meritless lawsuit that we will defend vigorously against, including recovering from Crytek any costs incurred in this matter."

So goes the statement from CIG, who has indeed switched engines. Anyway, you can check out the full legal filing here. Star Citizen is still in development. Alongside Squadron 42.

cloud imperium games crytek star citizen lawsuit

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Tollaz0r!
Posted 09:04am 15/12/17

It would be a shame if they signed a contract saying they are using CryENGINE to develop Start Citizen and that by switching to Luberyard they are in breach of such a contract..

Surely Crytek wouldn't be risking losing a law suit over such a trivial defense which amounts to 'we don't even use, bro'...

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Raven
Posted 09:36am 15/12/17

Star Citizen and S42 have so far been so dodgy I'm happy to see this happen. Roberts has always been an idiot when it comes to scope creep and hitting deadlines, and it's well past time something like this bit him on the ass bigtime. This isn't the first dodgy thing they've done with turning S42 in to a separate game.

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Twisted
Posted 12:09pm 15/12/17

If anyone wants to get bored here is a patent attorney talking about the law suit. He steps through the filing and discusses all the claims/issues/stuffs.

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Khel
Posted 12:13pm 15/12/17

I dunno who's side I'm on with this, I've been dubious of Star Citizen and the way they make their money all along so not really fans of them, but at the same time this seems like cash grab by Crytek as well. I mean, Lumberyard is basically CryEngine anyway, and Crytek reportedly got quite a bit of money from Amazon for that, so I dunno if they really have a legitimate reason to be butthurt about it.

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E.T.
Posted 12:37pm 15/12/17

Star Citizen creator talking about why they moved to Lumberyard.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/star-citizen-rebuilt-amazon-lumberyard-173727579.html

Star Citizen was rebuilt in Amazonâ€™s Lumberyard, and it only took a few days

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notgreazy
Posted 05:13pm 15/12/17

Wait, Lumberyard is free? You have to pay for AWS computing but the rest is free...

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Viper119
Posted 05:17pm 15/12/17

You're telling me there's a graphics engine as stunning as CryEngine that's free and everyone isn't using it to make all the games!?

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Khel
Posted 06:31pm 15/12/17

Yeah, 'free' but tied to AWS so you just pay for the AWS services you use. Its a no brainer though if you're planning to make a game and want easy cloud services integration or twitch integration or stuff like that.

Lots of engines are free or close to free these days. Unreal Engine 4 is free till your game makes $3000, then you pay 5% royalties, Unity I believe is royalty free but you pay a per-seat monthly fee or a bigger upfront fee (though bigger in this case means more like $1,500, nowhere near what a game engine used to cost to license). Game engines are a lot more than just graphics though, so end of the day it comes down to choosing the right tool for the right job. Good time to be a hobby/indie developer though, plenty of easy access to full blown triple A quality engines and tools

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trog
Posted 09:21pm 15/12/17

Wow I'd never heard of Lumberyard. So it's like a rebadged CryEngine with better cloud hooks? Amazon are incredible.

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Twisted
Posted 10:58pm 15/12/17

Amazon are incredible.

Incredibly expensive! We're spending a few million a month on AWS resources...s*** is expensive as. Way more expensive than our traditional data centre stuff that's for sure...still they do some really cool stuff. Interesting they're offering a game engine.

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trog
Posted 03:03am 16/12/17

Incredibly expensive! We're spending a few million a month on AWS resources...s*** is expensive as. Way more expensive than our traditional data centre stuff that's for sure...still they do some really cool stuff. Interesting they're offering a game engine.

yeh I often wonder at what point people with large spends break and finally move back to a traditional model. I know a few places that have done it (Dropbox famously) but I reckon it's super seductive even if it's much cheaper in many cases.

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Raven
Posted 09:16am 18/12/17

yeh I often wonder at what point people with large spends break and finally move back to a traditional model. I know a few places that have done it (Dropbox famously) but I reckon it's super seductive even if it's much cheaper in many cases.

We have. A few years ago there were a heap of golden handshakes for Oracle services; A lot of stuff has not been bought back in-house. On the other hand, there's still people pushing to out-source many services, so who knows, there's just no consistency.

Personally I think there's some stuff that putting in the cloud is just a bad idea. Hell, the idiots next door have all their source code that was publicly searchable/indexed on GitHub, even though I manage a BitBucket instance here, am in the process of migrating another BitBucket instance in to that one, and in the new year will be setting up a second very large BitBucket instance for another purpose.
That kind of s*** doesn't belong in the cloud.

Licensing/hosting for Confluence and JIRA is about twice as expensive for the cloud version, OR, I can just run it on a VM here on a 480-CPU cluster.

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