Posted on December 18, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 7
Posted on December 18, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 7
I think the Coutts loan is a trivial detail in this story, and got blown out of proportion because some of the paperwork was public. Having to put up everything as collateral is a completely normal way to get a good deal on interest. Collateral and credit do not need to match in value, and in fact rarely do.
Amazon has an article linked on their AWS | Lumberyard page that includes quotes from Carl Jones talking about the switch.
Since you adopted CryEngine 3 before the free-license change, did the move to Lumberyard and its royalty free model, mean it was a cost saving for Cloud Imperium?
Well you can’t get better value than free, of course! In the future, it means we will be able to do a lot more for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 without being concerned about the cost of licensing technology, which is no bad thing, but it doesn’t make a huge difference for us economically, in the short term.
Was the decision to move to Lumberyard at all based on the financial difficulties faced by Crytek?
We certainly wanted a technology partner that could support us and be with us for the long term, investing in tools and technology year after year, which Amazon of course can uniquely deliver. But mostly we liked Amazon’s strategy for gaming, specifically with Lumberyard, Twitch and AWS. We knew that over time Amazon would create the best game engine and support technologies to enable and power online games using AWS – it’s inevitable and will be a big help to us and our community, now and in the future. We’re always looking long term at CIG, and with Amazon as a partner, we’re able to feel confident about the future.
I just wanted to chime in with a quick effort post about something I keep hearing the dedicated citizens say. They keep claiming that the timing of this lawsuit is suspect and that Crytek is only doing this because they’re out of money/failed/bad dudes.
I have a lot of experience creating and administering contracts both large and small. In a previous life I used to create large contracts as an architect for very complex renovation projects, and now I make small contracts as a service provider to architects and other designers, so I’ve been on both sides of these contracts. These are slightly different than a contract that a game studio and engine holder would enter into, but the tools and intents are the same.
The timing of the lawsuit is in no way suspect to me. Contracts are tools that provide two things(among others): a codified agreement between two parties, and a tool to navigate this agreement and make sure the other side is honest. It protects both parties, and gives both parties recourse in case the other party does something that isn’t in the agreement or is against it. During the course of a complex project, you’ll encounter many small instances where one side or the other will test the contract. These are like little micr-breaches of the agreement. It’s usually just something small that happens during the course of a project that neither side anticipated, or one side didn’t realize was actually a part of the contract at all. When these things happen, the side that believes it has been wrong just reaches out to the other side, and what usually happens is a dialogue where both sides make their point and agree to either amend the agreement to add in for this unforseen circumstance, or the side that didn’t realize they were out of line must come back in line or offer some kind of recompense for their micro-breach. This is all usually done by the two parties and is almost always quite amicable.
A contract can be a kind of living document, so these changes are somewhat expected over the course of a long project, and sometimes these changes take time to make. The point of having a contract is to spell out exactly what you think should happen between two or more parties, so that no one needs to go to court. Sometimes, when one side does something that isn’t allowed, it takes along time for the other side to notice, and the side that has been wronged doesn’t immediately start making threats, they just open a dialogue instead. This negotiation can take quite a while and if the other party is fucking up other parts of the contract while this negotiation is happening, it can complicate things quite badly and cause bad feelings on either side.
The main thing to realize is that all of this takes a lot of time. If you’ve ever been a freelance and had to chase someone down to get a cheque or to sign off on a final version of something, you know how this goes. You phone, they stop answering. You e-mail, they don’t reply. I have a “payment due upon receipt” line in all of my contracts as well as on all of my invoices. I’d say I’m lucky in getting around 25% of those cheques within two weeks, even though we both agreed. You don’t get lawyers involved immediately because going to court is expensive as fuck for both parties, causes a lot of stress, and will almost always kill your business relationship with your client.
These breaches that Crytek is complaining about took place a long time ago, and they didn’t want to go to a trial because they wanted to salvage what they could in their agreement. Going to court isn’t something to take lightly, and is only done when all the bridges are pretty much burnt already. The reason this took so long is because it takes a long time to finally lose hope that the person or company you’re dealing with is going to do the right thing as per the contract.
G0RF
Note to the CIG Intern reading this thread for objectionable material for senior management:Do you really think Chris and Sandi need more crap to worry about right now? The dissent you’ve been long tasked with monitoring and cataloging has gone viral. It didn’t all originate here, or with Derek, it emerges naturally for reasonable minds paying passing attention to the non-stop marathons of self-owns, unforced errors, overpromises and undeliveries and uninterrupted lying that “filters from the top” of CIG. The true enemy of this project was within all along. They sent you here. So it really might be time to polish up that CV, file your honest Glassdoor take, and bounce to a better job at a company not in terminal decay spiral induced by moral turpitude and gross incompetence. You deserve better!
We don’t have the GLA, nor do we know what communication took place between CIG and Crytek. What we can assume, however, is that:
1. Skadden are reasonably competent, given that they’re considered a top international law firm; and
2. Skadden have pored through the GLA, any amendments and any communications between CIG/Crytek and felt that, on the facts discovered, they could make the five claims I’ll talk about.
Because of these assumptions, I’m going to make some further assumptions of fact:
1. CIG/RSI had an agreement (GLA), and all the clauses mentioned in the complaint were in that agreement;
2. The agreement was never ended, either by a break clause exercised by CIG/RSI/Crytek, nor by mutual agreement; and
3. There were no automatic triggers in the GLA that ended the agreement (time limits, events, etc.).
With that in mind, let’s get to the meat of the subject; Crytek’s claims against CIG/RSI.
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Claim 1: CIG/RSI are developing a second game without a license from Crytek.
This one is one of the simpler ones to confirm; we know for a fact that Squadron 42 was never a separate game from Star Citizen, this can be seen in the Kickstarter, where Squadron 42 is listed as the ‘singleplayer component’ of Star Citizen (i.e. it was just a game mode in a single game). Following the initial pitch of a single game, it was only later that CIG decided to split Star Citizen into two independent, separately playable, packages (note how Squadron 42 does not require Star Citizen to play). This split is where Star Citizen became two games, and the point where CIG appears to have breached its contract with Crytek.
Claim 2: CIG agreed to market Cryengine, including keeping its logo on splash screens, showing the trademark on the website, etc.
Honestly, this is a no-brainer, there’s very little to dispute here; we know that CIG very likely breached this because there’s tons of very public changes to the CIG website, launcher, splash screen, etc. where Cryengine/Crytek’s logos were removed and Lumberyard replaced them. In fact, it was so noticable that the commandos shat a brick when it first appeared around this time last year with no announcement.
Claim 3: CIG agreed to develop Star Citizen exclusively on Cryengine.
Again, this is something so well documented and lauded that there is little more to add here. The backers have tried pointing out that it Lumberyard is based on Cryengine which they say muddies the legal waters, but the fact is that CIG had no permission to use another engine to develop Star Citizen. What the basis of these engines are is irrelevant, the clause would have been breached the moment they announced the change, started plastering Lumberyard logos everywhere and using Lumberyard’s tools.
Claim 4: CIG agreed to send bug updates/improvements to Crytek.
There are two factors to consider here; the first being that Crytek claims that CIG did send some updates/improvements in 2015 but that they were insufficient and not in good faith, while the second factor is that Crytek claims that CIG did not send any updates/improvements for 2016-2017. On the first factor, there will likely be some contention by CIG regarding whether what was sent in 2015 was in good faith or not. This likely means that there will be some expert opinion on what CIG sent to Crytek in 2015 and whether it is enough to satisfy CIG’s obligations to Crytek in this clause.
The second factor, however, would be much more clear-cut if true; if CIG did not send any updates/improvements over the last two years, then it’s almost certain that this would be seen as a breach of their contractual obligations.
Claim 5: CIG breached Crytek’s copyright by chowing Cryengine’s code on Bugsmashers and third parties.
Ok, this one is outside my comfort zone, but I suspect it will be down to legal and expert opinion in this case. The main issue at hand is ‘how much exposure of code in Bugsmashers is enough to constitute a breach?’. This is something that would require some degree of expertise in US copyright law (which I don’t have since I trained in the UK) so I can’t really answer this and would also likely require expert testimony in the form of a game developer. In addition, whether or not CIG was sharing code with Faceware is something that could only be determined by seeing what evidence Crytek has to show this. Do note, though, that Skadden wouldn’t flippantly make such claims without some damn good evidence/legal knowledge to back them up.
–—
Essentially, contract-wise, CIG would only come out of this unscathed if there was a break clause in the GLA that they exercised before claims 1-4 took place or if they otherwise mutually agreed with Crytek to do the same. Such a clause or agreement would be so obvious and such a basic thing to miss by Skadden that I cannot accept that this is the case here. CIG’s response to the lawsuit (where they essentially agreed they breached claim 3) also displays an alarming(ly hilarious) degree of ignorance about the claims levelled against them.
Overall, this complaint makes a lot of things in CIG’s past add up; the sudden change to Lumberyard makes sense if you consider that CIG was chained to an agreement with Crytek but saw an opportunity when Crytek suffered financial woes. My guess is that CIG couldn’t get Cryengine to work for SC, saw Lumberyard and figured it would be easier to work with and then jumped ship, assuming that Crytek would simply disappear and no-one would pick up the contract and pursue them afterwards (or, alternatively, Chris didn’t know that might happen or didn’t care). The split of Squadron 42 may have been particularly scummy as it may have been CIG trying to stiff Crytek out of royalties for sales when it knew that Crytek would be unable to dispute their action (this is all just speculation, though).
tl;dr: CIG tried to fuck over Crytek, thinking Crytek would go bust, and it came screaming back to bite them in the ass.
If they get the injunction, it will be over faster than a glazed dozen within arm’s reach of banditloaf.
G0RF
Ben’s story arc is just really amazing. After being raptured from the education system and snatched up to the opportunity of a lifetime to serve at the pleasure of his godking, he got to watch firsthand as that man destroyed — mistake after mistake, impulse after impulse, lie after lie — the greatest opportunity even bestowed upon an independent developer in gaming history.
Yet after all that, he really may end up unironically returning to the good work of cataloging Wing Commander arcana in the end. He took a pile of detritus off Sandi’s hands, stuff of interest to nearly no one besides Chris, Ben and a handful of whales of a certain age would possible give a crap about, yet with it he may find contentment and engagement for years more to come. Harkening back to the ‘greatness’ of what once was just as he did before Chris and Sandi came into his life, faithful until death.
Scruffpuff
Ben is quite literally defective on a fundamental level. Something (or a great many somethings) are violently misfiring in his brain. I think a true victory is Ben snapping out of it, turning on CIG, and burying the true villains.
It totally won’t happen. But in my private alternate universe I can imagine this ending any way I like.
CryTek’s claims cites a breach for CIG/RSI not only showing the code during their Bugsmashers, but also sharing it with a third party, namely Faceware. Looking at the Lumberyard agreement, they have similar stipulations. So there is a possibility that if any Bugsmashers showed more than 50 lines of code, then arguably CIG/RSI are also in violation of the [//aws.amazon.com/service-terms/#57._Amazon_Lumberyard_Engine)
when discussing Lumberyard Materials in our forums or elsewhere, you may include up to 50 lines of source code from the Lumberyard Materials for the sole purpose of discussing that code. You must identify us as the source of the code.
While this sort of accidental and incidental breaches are not worthy of lawsuits, the small claims in the CryTek lawsuit, tend to add up and compound the larger claims.
Still the the most compelling exchange in this whole saga and really ground zero for the anti-SC v SC people and the reason why I really got interested in this whole story. It was all to incredible. Here you have a paying customer (backer) laying out his arguments as to why he feels there are huge issues with how long the game is taking and why so little has been done and your #1 marketing person can’t answer them at all except to get personal and defense. Utterly incredible and completely unprofessional. How could one customer service exchange cause them to get so unhinged? Because the insights Beer provides hit too close to home I think.
For someone claiming to be “the best salesperson in the world” (another incredible line and hilarious) she certainly did a terrible job of it in those emails. Instead of trying to sell it basically personally attacked a guy for having a different opinion. And for people wondering why the SC is toxic and insular it’s because the top people leading the project (Sandi and Chris) are themselves as we just saw. Beer asking legit questions and she takes it all personal and basically tells him to f off.
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