Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

The judge denied CIG’s motion for a protective order to stay discovery. Thread

For those laymen amongst us, what does that mean?

It basically means nothing for basically everyone.

The court suggested that CIG&Crytek start discovery early but has not ordered a schedule for discovery.

CIG filed a motion to delay discovery until after their Motion to Dismiss is decided on.

The Court basically said that their motion is meaningless because there has not been a schedule for the discovery so there is nothing to delay.

I don’t know if the Judge will be annoyed down the road that CIG is delaying when the Judge suggested they get started and what that might impact, but as far as spectating this lawsuit this ruling doesn’t matter at all.

Agreed. It wasn’t supposed to do anything other than enable CIG to continue delaying the process with frivolous filings. Good thing is that the judge’s order suggests that they now have her attention going forward. So we’ll see if they try to pull similar delay tactics down the road.

Thing is that Crytek did start discussions (it’s in their response to the PO filing) with CIG about a scheduling for discovery. CIG resisted. THEN they went and filed the PO which basically gave them 6 (they filed it on Mar 9th) weeks of nothing to do/comply while waiting for the judge’s ruling.

As someone who hears that acronym all too much at work I got a laugh out of that.

I’m not sure they comprehend the “minimum” and “viable” elements of an MVP.

So I have no horse in this race but love me a little PC game drama…

I read through the lawsuit and read much of the content on Dr. Smart’s website but I’m not sure I understand what’s going on here. Crytek is suing CIG because CIG used another (or different) engine ingame despite the contract between the two parties? And if I’m summarizing this correctly… why did CIG do this?

The only ones who really knows are the squirrels remote controlling Chris Roberts.
Or Possibly his space door, i’m assuming it is sentient.

I thought part of the problem was that they used the engine for two distinct games as well, or was that part not important?

Maybe this will help. It’s all in chrono order, complete with commentary (in layman terms) for all to understand.

Yes, it’s dumpster fire.

Crytek is alleging 5 things

thanks for clarifying

Crytek fucked up the language (but then, it was (partly?) written by a co-founder of CIG, so hilarity is ensuing), and CIG claims said fuck up allows it to suffer no consequences for abandoning the contract and switching engines in 2016 (the later event has rather dubious believability, IMHO) and that it allowed it to start SQ42 as a separate game.

Those are the main points of contention, but it’s far from all claimed infringements: there’s proprietary code that was shown on streams and non-competes. It’s a mess for a layman to make any sense of, but I have a feeling they will regret some of the statements in their fillings.

So I’ll put this here for me and anyone else (copy and pasted from your site). Thanks.

From my reading of it, it boils down to a simple claim: they switched engines to avoid paying CryTek their share of over $170m in revenue.

You would be wrong. CIG already had a fully paid license for a single game (Star Citizen). No royalties.

By using the single license for SQ42 - even if they didn’t switch - they skirted having to fork out money for another license. That CryEngine is already free, has no bearing on that. And that’s the hilarious part of that specific issue.

Then they went all out and claimed to have switched to Lumberyard - though they didn’t.

They’re in a Catch-22 screw-up because even if the agreement allowed them to switch, they are still on the hook for the other claims - and they would have to PROVE (we don’t believe that they did, as it would be LOT of work. Because CE3 and LY are derivatives, they didn’t have to do a full 100% swtich) that they switched and no longer are using ANY part of CryEngine. And if they were not allowed to switch - then they did - well, here we are.

ps. I wrote a blog about that switch

I dunno man.

They are trying to make a videogame. Thats good, no?

But, like, are they though?

That’s the 180 million dollars question, isn’t it? ;)

Well, obviously yes. Maybe they overpromise and underdeliver (thats always subjetive), but they go and release stuff. Maybe thats worth some respect.

I agree. It’s not so much that the devs aren’t doing their best to produce something. The blame - all of it - lies with Chris and his upper echelon cronies. He pushed this beyond their technical and experience abilities, thus killing the project slowly. Had he stuck with the original 2012 “vision”, we’d probably have a game in 2015, and talking about expansions now. Just like a normal studio would plan for.

This is all on him.

And once they figured they had a bunch of saps willing to give them money - for no apparent reason other than Sunk Cost Fallacy - they abused that privilege and just continued downhill.

It’s amazing to me that in Sept 2014 when they had raised $65M, the game was supposed to have been out in Nov 2014, at a cost of $2M. Yet, +3 years + $115M later, they still only have a glorified tech demo.

I work Corporate America IT and this sort of project would never fly, not in the 21st century. I have been on a few where more money kept getting thrown and things and it usually did not end well.