[analysis/roundup] The war over Star Citizen in Crytek v. Cloud Imperium Games - Sensationalist Headlines

https://massivelyop.com/2019/05/03/lawful-neutral-the-war-over-star-citizen-in-crytek-v-cloud-imperium-games/ This article is a quick summary of the case so far and is reasonably accurate. I'll supplement it with a breakdown of the current state of the case since they understandably didn't in their whirlwind summary of the whole case. We are still in the phase of determining legal viability of arguments, not providing hard evidence proving things true or false, and Crytek's complaints have been shaved down to these remaining points: - Ortwin Freyermuth did not resolve the conflict of interest of being a co-founder of CIG and drafting the contract on CIG's side when he had previously worked for Crytek drafting such licensing contracts on Crytek's behalf, giving CIG an unethical advantage. CIG has stated they have a signed ethics waiver from Crytek for Ortwin permitting him to do what Crytek's now complaining about. - Crytek claims CIG exposed confidental Crytek code on Bugsmashers! YouTube segments explaining how this or that bug was fixed; Crytek has not substantiated any specific examples of infringement. - Crytek claims that Squadron 42 is a "second" game that CIG did not have the license to use CryEngine to make. Except the contract CIG and Crytek signed explicitly states that SQ42 and the MMO are one and the same. Also by the time SQ42 comes out it'll be running on Lumberyard, not CryEngine, so it doesn't even matter. - Crytek claims CIG never sent them bugfixes and patches as required by the GLA. CIG has stated in court documents that they have written confirmation from Crytek's lawyers that they did offer Crytek a repo of everything they were required to provide and sent them written notice in November 2015, and Crytek ignored the code repo entirely. Read that again: Crytek's lawyers confirmed that CIG sent them bugfixes, that Crytek received CIG's notice, and that they just did nothing with it. This confirmatory written correspondence occurred over a year before Crytek filed suit. (I'm simplifying matters but this is essentially correct.) - Crytek is angry that CIG removed their logos and claims this is a violation of the contract. CIG removed Crytek/CryEngine logos because, uh, they stopped using CryEngine. Keep in mind that the judge has already dismissed Crytek's claim that the contract should be unusually interpreted to mean that CIG was required to use CryEngine, so expect this to fizzle if it goes to trial. - Crytek claims that the corporate entity RSI is part of the full agreement because they signed an Autodesk license. The only way this makes sense and matters at all is if the corporate umbrella put important strategic assets like the money or the IP rights into RSI or something, but it doesn't do anything by itself if the rest of the case fizzles. I'll also mention that Crytek demanded statutory damages, but there's a big snag here and it affects the whole case. That snag is, Crytek didn't register their copyright for CryEngine until the day after they filed suit -- the US does not follow the Berne convention exactly in that, for contract disputes, copyright must be explicitly registered, and no infringement can occur before registration. By the time Crytek registered their copyright for CryEngine, CIG was already using Lumberyard fulltime. Crytek cannot hold CIG liable for statutory copyright infringement, only actual damages. Thanks to the judge destroying most of Crytek's important claims earlier in the case, the window Crytek has to claim actual damages is now tiny. Crytek is facing the dilemma that even if they win, they'll get so little that the reputation damage alone will not have been worth it. And unless Crytek goes fishing in discovery and finds new things to complain about, it seems like at best they're going to get actual damages for any Bugsmashers! videos that show Crytek code, which can be assumed to be next to zero. Crytek is now trying to force CIG into discovery, or to settle for a fat chunk of dosh to avoid going into the costly and painful discovery process. CIG has countered with a demand for a $2 million bond, requiring that Crytek put its skin in the game before CIG commits to the deep cavity inspection that is discovery. The deadlines for Crytek's counter-argument and the hearing where the judge will decide whether or not to grant the bond, and then decide on the schedule for discovery, have been pushed back until June. The case may be currently undergoing alternative dispute resolution, but I'm not ready to call Crytek scared and looking to settle until we hear that they're settling or we see them piss their pants in court -- which very well could happen if the judge grants the security bond. Shit is looking bad for Crytek but the case is not over yet. Read past the end of the article at your own risk: Derek Smart has been posting in their comments all weekend.

Whatever happens, I hope Hunt: Showdown survives this.

This is definitely off topic, but what's the deal with this guy? Why does one man get this kind of disclaimer, compared to any other random person in the comments section? Is this like a feud of some sort?

He's had issues with Chris Roberts for years, and has been trying to drag down anything with his name on it.

Smart thought of himself as a competitor to Chris Roberts and the Wing Commander/Freelancer franchises back in the 90s, and his first game, which he had spent years on Usenet and in game mag interviews hyping it to be the uber space simulator to end all space sims, was stuck in dev hell before eventually being released as a stillborn alpha-wip by Take 2, his fourth publisher, after they got fed up with him playing games with them (they hired him a dev team, he couldn't get along with them and eventually forked the source and refused to share his repo with T2 or his dev team) and released what they had with his name on it. With a release like that, you might expect that it would bomb hard, and you're right. The Wing Commander series, meanwhile, was already a hit by the time Smart's Battlecruiser 3000 AD shipped. He's had a hardcore grudge against Roberts ever since, and when Roberts came back in 2012 promising to make the most advanced, ground-breaking, envelope-pushing immersive space sim ever (sound familiar?) it kind of broke Smart's mind and since about 2015 he's been on a perpetual tirade. He's been permabanned from both Reddit and SA for a total of five doxxing incidents because one way or another people made him so angry about SC. If you remember two articles published by The Escapist alleging all sorts of shit (like racism) in Star Citizen's offices, which prompted legal threats from CIG at The Escapist, his fingerprints were all over the super-sketchy anonymous sources and the fake Glassdoor reviews the story referred to, and he sent a gloating email to Ortwin Freyermuth, Roberts' co-founder, before the second story hit the web. He's not here for rational criticism, he's here to try and burn things to the ground. There are tons of reasonable things to criticise about SC but Smart's the last place you want to look.

He saw Star Citizen as the game he wanted to create, with the feature creep he wanted. "Damn!" he said "Why can't I get that much money from people willing to invest in a super-huge space sim?"

He made a buggy game about spaceships and now he's obsessed with CIG and RSI failing. Most people know about him because of this video tho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIn1_9YvGds

Back on topic, I've read a lot of the filings that the case has produced and they're often pretty tedious, but every so often you get some sicknasty legal banter that spices things up, mostly from CIG's lawyers. I didn't want to put this stuff in the OP because it'd have cluttered it bad, but here's bits from just the bond request filing: While Crytek now complains about the removal of the credits, in fact Crytek has been trying to disassociate itself from CIG for years. From 2013 through early 2015, before Crytek’s financial problems caused a number of its employees to resign and join CIG, Crytek featured Star Citizen and CIG in its social media posts, promotional videos, and in the “Developer Showcase” videos that it exhibited at the annual Game Developers Conference, one of the gaming industry’s biggest and most important trade shows. However, Crytek abruptly stopped doing so in 2015, pointedly omitting Star Citizen from its annual “Developer Showcase” video that year and ceasing all its social media mentions of the game or CIG after January 22, 2015. Crytek’s claim that it suffered monetary damage from the loss of “promotional consideration” due to CIG’s removal of notices crumbles into a heap of hypocrisy. Here, Crytek is a foreign (German) corporation, CIG is contractually and statutorily entitled to its attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenses as the prevailing party in this action, and CIG has far greater than a “reasonable possibility” of obtaining a judgment against Crytek for such an award. An adequate bond is especially warranted in this case, given the myriad reported financial problems that have plagued Crytek in recent years, and the alarming risk that Crytek will be unable to satisfy the judgment awarded to Defendants. The requested bond will prevent CIG from holding the bag when Crytek, an overseas corporation teetering on the brink of insolvency and that has already demonstrated a “kitchen sink” approach to this proceeding, cannot make good on contractual and statutory cost and fee awards. C. Crytek reeks of chronic financial decline. Crytek’s known and reported financial problems are breathtaking: precipitously declining revenues, increased debt obligations, studio closures, asset divestitures, nonpayment of employee salaries, mass employee exoduses and, soon after filing this suit, the replacement of the company’s CEO. Absent a substantial security bond, it appears disturbingly likely that when CIG prevails in this action, Crytek will leave CIG holding the bag for millions.

Derek Smart is That Gmod addon/Skyrim utlity plugin Guy. You know, the one that has a basically good idea for _______. _______ gets pretty popular and That Guy turns into an utter dick, and demands anyone using his plug in even something based around using the effects of his plugin start paying into his patreon and giving him full credit in the name of their mod/plugin. People understandably get tired of dealing with this insufferable asshole and so someone makes completely a different plugin that does the same things but even better, (1)first thing he claims it it's a ripoff stealing code, when that fails because it's not (2) he claims IP rights over the plugin which fails because it's derived from base code that is either universal or simply not his because it's engine based so then (3) he claims IP over the concept which also fails cause it's some basic bitch generic shit (4) so he then claims with non rights that he actually influenced the engine itself's design cause his ego is just that big (5) despite the devs publicly saying they have no idea who this asshole is. This guy used to be wealthy, not rich but actually wealthy and literally pissed away his entire fortune making super super shit games he insisted on basically making by himself and never finishing due to A feature creep (irony) and B not really knowing what the fuck he was doing outside his own disciplines but doing it himself anyway, very badly, and (C) being lawsuits on all kinds of shit over the years, most of them unsuccessful, and now he's damn near broke.

I kinda love Derek Smart because he's got such an absurd sense of drama and righteousness. I am definitely tired of how media companies and stuff quote him as if he's an expert though. He's completely ridiculous and his own crowdfunded game called Line of Defense was a total disaster.

Are you one of the people I play against?

Why aren't you posting in tbe Hunt thread? We need more people to play with!

looks like he got his non-'the' account nuked

u/thedereksmart has been both shadowbanned and then permanently suspended from Reddit for two doxxing incidents (also Smart ran a subreddit specifically dedicated to harassing another user). He makes ban evasion alts over VPN and they get nuked promptly, like the sad kind of FP troll that keeps making alts every day or two which the mods execute in two or three clicks. He's still trying to troll r/starcitizen with his alts, like three years after he made himself ban on sight. The sub suppresses discussion of him because it just invites him to come in and defend himself on another alt. On the topic, it's kind of funny to look at the old threads about the lawsuit, when it was first emerging, and see people argue that Crytek will win just because they hired expensive lawyers. I'm sure Skadden are good lawyers but if you read my summary in the OP you can see that Crytek did a shit job of managing their situation before turning it into a legal case: copyright registration was so late it invalidates half the complaint, literally complaining things never happened a year after CIG got written confirmation from Crytek's lawyers that it did happen, and infantile word weasel games to try and turn a standard contract term into a binding exclusivity straightjacket that the judge threw out a window far too easily. It's not the end and Crytek might still win, but unless a smoking gun emerges from discovery it'll be a pyrrhic victory at best, with a handful of cash to go with their new reputation of sucking at business so hard they give their former partners legal shakedowns for more cash after their incompetently-drafted contracts backfire.