If you’ve followed general gaming news for awhile, you may have heard that the developer Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness, X-Men Destiny) was having serious difficulties staying afloat due to a number of reasons. Now it turns out that things are far worse than we all thought, with the Canadian studio now ordered to recall almost all of its games at its own expense.
Why? Turns out Silicon Knights has lost its legal battle with Epic Games over the use of Unreal Engine Technology in their titles, which they used for a number of games including X-Men Destiny and Too Human.
Whether or not the recall covers DS and Wii versions of the universally maligned X-Men Destiny (along with the Xbox 360 and PS3) editions hasn’t been confirmed, but we should know shortly.
Here’s what Eurogamer had to say about the situation:
“In May Silicon Knights was ordered to pay Epic $4.45 million in damages after the jury found in favour of its counter claims. The court ruled that Silicon Knights breached their Unreal license agreement, misappropriated Epic’s trade secrets and infringed Epic’s copyrights in the Unreal Engine 3 code.
The argument between the two parties started back in 2007. Silicon Knights claimed that Epic was holding money back that it should have spent supporting Unreal Engine and pouring it into Gears of War development. Problems with the engine allegedly caused the Too Human studio to ditch the tech at the last minute and develop its own system, resulting in development costs shooting up.”
In the meantime, this means that your copy of X-Men Destiny that you don’t want, won’t play, and can’t sell? Might actually become a bit of a collector’s item in the future. How’s that for irony?
