Hmmm, for better or worse CIG have made an interesting move, using their response to serve as a platform for essentially public release of the otherwise commercial-in-confidence and NDA’d GLA.
Anyhoo, my read is that they are free and clear on SC licensing, IMO. They paid for a licence in several installments, made up of a license fee and a royalty buy-out. Presuming they made good on all installments (which Crytek is not complaining about), then they indeed own a license for CryEngine to use for SC. Awesome. They are now just choosing not to use it. And the public timeline supports that the switch to Lumberyard came after the final installment payment, so CIG have fulfilled their requirements under this contract - ie paid in full for a license.
They have just chosen not to use a license they procured. Nothing in here actually forces them use the license they paid for, it just sets terms for how to use it if they were to use it (credits, splash screen, reverse code revisions, etc). The ‘exclusive’ stuff I believe refers to the legal terminology regarding types of license grants (exclusive vs non-exclusive), which determines how both parties might be able to use IP, rather than actually force one party to use a license, as much as Crytek’s complaint seems to suggest the latter. It will be super interesting if Crytek can back this up with documented bi-partisan intent, even though if that is the case I wonder why it would not have been more clearly documented in the contract. It’s not clear, because two lines in turn refer to non-exclusive and exclusive grants. With neither term defined elsewhere, it must fall back to a legal definition, which relates to use of IP, rather then a clause to force to use of CryEngine and only CryEngine.
To me, it looks like CIG paid for a license for SC, then switched to Lumberyard (which was made relatively easy due to shared code base) for other reasons, be it alternate network stack or Amazon sweet-talking/money-hatting them with AWS to be an anchor LY client. Whatever, their dues to Crytek for SC were paid.
I think they are still fucked on SQ42 though. It’s obvious back in 2012 that everyone intended SC and SQ42 to be two elements of one game. That has definitely changed and it should not be too hard to demonstrate that even CIG have considered SQ42 a separate title for quite some time. I can’t remember when they started selling SQ42 as a separate SKU, but I am sure it was before the July 2016 final installment date, which to my mind would put them in breach of not having acquired a separate licence/agreement for it. It’s going to be very hard for them to defend not having to separately license if they are forced to acknowledge it is a standalone title, which they are going to have to do, since they refer to it as standalone in much of their own marketing, media and forums.
They are also potentially on the hook for displaying or sharing CryEngine code without permission via Bugsmashers incidentally and potentially sharing with uncleared 3rd parties/partners and the other relatively minor stuff of failing to share code updates, but that looks to be a bi-directional complaint. I imagine it would be tough to prove specific damages though?
All that stuff is leverage noise though - Crytek want a license fee for SQ42, which CryEngine was almost certainly being used to develop after they began referring/selling it as a standalone SKU and before final installment and subsequent switch to LY, essentially putting them in breach. It think they’ll probably get it in settlement, shooting for the fee/buy-out figure of SC as baseline (EURO$1.8M).
Obligatory IANAL. Just someone that also occasionally deals with enterprise licensing.
