Star Citizen Cloud Imperium vs CryTek Lawsuit
Just when you thought the Star Citizen Cloud Imperium vs CryTek Lawsuit was over… well it is BUT We had some interesting information come out of Cloud Imperiums Company Accounts Statement which may allude more to what happened with their settlement. It had a Strategic Report explaining some things that the company had done and planned for 2019/2020 and it had a section about CryEngine.
“During 2020, [CIG] further strengthened its position as a AAA game developer by acquiring a perpetual license for CryEngine from game development platform provider Crytek GmBH, ensuring the business continues to be agile in developing its revolutionary technology.”
Now this is interesting for many reasons…
CI already had a license for CryEngine
CI and Crytek had been in a legal battle that has been settled
Star Citizen & Squadron 42 have moved over to the Lumberyard Engine
Why Does Star Citizen acquire this perpetual license for CryEngine?
So lots of reasons are possible… It could of been part of the settlement with CryTek that CI were given or procured a “perpetual” license for CryEngine… this might have a lot more leeway in what they can do with it… modify it, use it for their tools, use it for 2 separate games and potentially use parts of it with lumberyard engine… it might even allow them to get the latest versions of cryengine and use them too.
Didn’t they already have a license… yes but their GLA was limited to certain activities and one of the things that CryTek had sued CI over originally was developing 2 games with 1 license… where CryTek had said it only covered 1.
A sensible resolution to that would be for them to obtain another or expanded license.
The Original Licence was around $2m.
Does this license have any use… hasn’t Star Citizen and Squadron moved over to Lumberyard… well it might have no use now… we know that the games moved over to lumberyard but Lumberyard is an offshoot of the CryEngine.
AND it’s possible that sections of the game OR tools they make the game OR new tech / modules for the game were built with the original CryEngine… something that might be difficult to use without a line or 100 of code from CryEngine… OR entirely reworking MASSIVE SECTIONS of the Game… and if they are developing the Lumberyard Engine further… it might be beneficial to not have CryEngine saying… well you can use some of this code… because technically it’s ours…
A lot of acquiring this license might of been to just to avoid a headache from CI further down the line…. We do know that the original lawsuit was looking very much in CI’s favor and CryTek were looking to dismiss their own case before they settled… we had originally suggested that they would have both just paid their own legal fees… but it’s possible that CI paid another $2m for a license or that they demanded it as part of the settlement so that CryTek didn’t try and prevent sales of Squadron 42 / Star Citizen or sue again in the future.
It’s quite possible that CI saw some merit in CryTek’s argument of you shouldn’t have been developing 2 separate games with our license or more precisely… that they might not of been able to sell them as 2 separate games with the GLA they had with CryTek…
My expectation is that some of the tools and custom modules they have made for the StarEngine still use CryEngine code to some extent and that makes sense to me.