ARK Survival Evolved sues Steam rivals, raises serious allegations – wants money

On By Garmin Philip

The two companies behind the dinosaur mega-hit ARK Survival Evolved have counterclaimed Angela Games, the makers of “Myth of Empire”. The survival game was a hit on Steam for a few days until it was removed from the platform due to plagiarism allegations. ARK has made serious allegations against the studio and China giant Tencent.

This is the situation:

  • In November, the survival MMO “Myth of Empire” was released on Steam. The game was described as a mixture of “Survival MMO” and “Mount & Blade” – Myth of Empire had around 36,600 users on the first day and was especially recommended to fans of ARK: Survival Evolved and Rust
  • After less than 2 weeks, the game disappeared from Steam. It later emerged: The developers of ARK Survival Evolved had “made allegations” that the game had infringed their copyrights, so Steam removed the game from the store after the “DMCA takedown” in order to investigate the situation
  • The developers of Myth of Empire declare that they have all rights to the game. There is no doubt that Steam will explain that. ARK, on ​​the other hand, said it was convinced that the developers had stolen the source code of ARK Survival Evolved

Myth of Empire wants to return to Steam via court – it fails

So it went on: Until then, everything went without a lawyer and only addressed a copyright complaint to Steam.

But the company behind “Myth of Empire” called a court in California in mid-December that it should allow the purchase of “Myth of Empire” again in a “one-piece order”.

The request for an injunction was initially rejected because Snail Games had submitted a “large amount of evidence”, as the court ruled.

Myth of Empires Farming
Myth of Empire – Got into a lot of trouble very quickly.

The creators of ARK Survival Evolved want compensation and profits

This is now the latest development: In response to this request, the companies behind ARK Survival Evolved have filed a lawsuit against Myth of Empire.

It says:

  • Since the copyright complaint, Angela Games has been working to remove evidence that the code was stolen
  • Of the 82 employees at Angela Games, 60 were former employees of Snail Games (China), many of whom had quit in 2019 and 2020 to work at Angela Games
  • An employee at Snail Games was responsible for storing the source code in a backup server in China, who now also works for Angela Games.

The processes are detailed in a 39-page complaint (via google drive): An employee gained access to the source code in November 2018, copied the game from China to a US server, left the company in March 2019 and then joined Angela Games started – then Angela Games started developing the game.

In their rush to “profit from the theft”, the developers also left non-functional elements in the code. There is no explanation that these “relics” are in the code – unless it was just stolen, they say.

What does ARK ask for? They are demanding compensation and want to have the profits that came in from the sale of “Myth of Empire”. In addition, the alleged code thieves should give up all devices with unauthorized codes.

What does Tencent have to do with it? The makers of ARK accuse Tencent of being part of the number. To have an interest in Angela Games and that they allow the game to run on their server and not abide by the copyright complaint that would require the servers to be taken down.

ARK Survival Evolved: does the studio belong to the Chinese? Did you clone ARK?

ARK has had a difficult past of complaints of its own

This is the spice of the case: Some veterans may know that ARK Survival Evolved also emerged under difficult circumstances. The game’s chief programmer and mastermind, Jeremy Stieglitz, was under a clause when he designed ARK that actually forbade him to work on the game because he had previously worked on another MMORPG.

The developer therefore appeared anonymously and sent his wife, a bakery assistant, and his former student friend.

Also at ARK in 2016 there were allegations in the room that they did not design the dinosaur game themselves, but employees of Trendy Games, the former company of Stieglitz.

That ended with an apparently very expensive out-of-court settlement, which was largely kept quiet. Because the matter was apparently so expensive and money was needed, the developers later apparently turned on Snail Games, a Chinese company, and developed their own authorized “clones” of their game for the international market. Including for example “Dark & ​​Light” and a Free2Play version of ARK for Asia.

The two situations are not exactly comparable, but it is exciting that ARK of all things is now running into these problems – and the problems apparently arose at Snail Games (China). So ARK is taking on its own past a bit, because Snail Games would not have come together at all without your own scandal:

ARK Survival Evolved: The gaming scandal nobody talks about

Reference-mein-mmo.de