Silicon Knights have officially lost their appeal against Epic Games, which they filed back in June.
The original ruling made by the courts was in favour of Epic Games, and saddled Silicon Knights with a whopping $4.45 million in damages. The legal battle between these two has been a long one, as it started back in 2005 when Silicon Knights started it over some issues with the Unreal Engine 3.
SK had paid Epic Games $750’000 for the right to use the Unreal Engine 3 for the development of their catastrophic failure, Too Human. The original claim made was that the UE3 not only didn’t work properly, but that Epic Games had also refused to replace their version of the software and even accused them of interfering with publishing contracts.
And thus the battle was begun, with Epic filing a counterclaim which stated that not only had SK used the UE3 to develop titles (which were eventually cancelled) other than Too Human, they had also repeatedly copied thousands of lines of copyrighted code. Apparently they even forgot to remove copyright notices or correct typographical errors made my Epic.
Unsurprisingly, the ruling was made in Epic’s favour, with the Judge ordering SK to recall and destroy every unsold copy of Too Human and X-Men: Destiny, but also doubled the damages to $9.2 million to help cover $278,000 in costs, $2.1 million in attorneys’ fees and $2.3 million in prejudgment interest.
It looks like the case is now fully closed on this one, with Silicon Knight’s final hope of a appeal crumbling before them. At this time, the $9.2 million in damages must be paid. Not exactly a small sum to say the least, and I have a feeling that Silicon Knights are going to deeply regret messing with the monolith known as Epic Games.
