You don't do it by trial by jury if you think you've got a case:
I admitted they've been ambiguous. Elsewhere in the announcement they refer to it as a single-player campaign, but then they have a heading entitled "What will the separate games cost?" They've definitely put themselves in a position where Crytek can argue that they're treating the two as different games, connected though they may be.
S42 wasn't considered a completely separate product with it's own sku until recent though. Before S42 was the single player part of Star Citizen while while the persistent universe proper was the multiplayer aspect. All together it was Star Citizen. CIG is now treating them as two completely separate products and not just different sides of one. Packages used to be sold for $45 that included everything until what 2015 when that stopped. If you go back and look at the kickstarter S42 was just a mode. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/description
Yeah, your argument is completely valid...
Doesn't matter what they refer to them as, what matters is you go to their store and purchase either one game or the other. You aren't buying a game and then paying for the other bit as DLC, you are choosing from one of two separate products in their online store.
The demand for a jury may just be leaving their options open, they can always waive it later if they want. I don't think that's necessarily indicative of them trying for easy money
These lawyers went with a jury trial in the Zenimax case as well, which involved copyright and breach of contract (among other issues) and were extraordinarily successful. This may just be their standard operating procedure.
Not suitable is a bit ridiculous since Lumberyard was cut from the exact same cloth of source code that CIG was given when THEY licensed it. Any issues they would have found with CryEngine, they'd find in Lumberyard as well.
Its very different. The engine provider is not a publisher, especially not a 1st party publisher. Sony and Microsoft pay for development of the game, here CIG buyout the engine's full license and yet still have exclusivity restriction to their IP? That doesnt sound reasonable to say the least.
Its not 'very clearly' as they use wording like 'package' and 'addon'. Its about interpretations of those words.
Well the complaint is written by some top-tier lawyers and they definitely have checked the contract carefully, so it's unlikely this could be a lie. By the way it's also stated in the complaint that CIG get the license at a discounted rate.
From what I understand they sold/licensed one of the later versions of Cryengine 3 to Amazon for them to do what they wished with it. They didn't sell their business to them. Crytek continued on as usual with the engine.
In a question and then they are described in details in completely different wording.
Yep, its 100% clear like Star Citizen being whale-baiting scam, right?
As someone who doesn't know much about copyright law etc I appreciate this.
Also thank you very much for this, I started watching and I heard music and mic checking. Then he was just going over the written stuff, appreciate it. Haven't finished watching yet but I feel like 29:20 on is where I needed to really start.
And if it's not moot they could just unlock the whole game for previous purchasers of squadron and stop selling them separately making it moot for less cost than whatever Crytek wants :P
TIL Steam is actually just one huge game with a number of "modules" that you can purchase separately.
The issue is did they even have a legal right based on their contracts to even do this. As long as S42 was just a mode of Star Citizen the same way Zombies or multiplayer is just a mode of any normal Call of Duty they likely were fine. That is how it was originally setup and designed. They were just selling and releasing one product. If their contract was based on a single license to release one product and now they're releasing two individual products that's where the issue lies. The origins of the second product don't really matter here. They were selling one product with the license to make one and now they're selling two products off of the single license. The correct thing to do was to go back to Crytek and attempt to edit the original deal or to secure a second individual license. Or if they wanted to switch engines then they would have have to get out of the contract and that likely meant paying Crytek the balance on what the would have been charged at the time the original deal was made. Maybe some other fees that might exist when you try to break contracts I don't know.
