Gearbox suing EDuke32 devs

According to Kaiser, it was Gearbox that "reclaimed" (practically stole) development of ACM and ended up throwing out most of the work that the other companies had done on it (including Timegate, where he worked) and replacing it with Randy Bitchford's ideas of what the game ought to be. Which is why Kaiser can point out maybe a handful of areas where his level design still survives in the final product at best. So you know who to blame.

So Randy's a prick who crushes people's developments and imposes his own will. Awesome, I know what company I'm not going to support in the future. Has TerminX considered going the D-Touch route and just making a source port that the user has to provide a grp file to? Then he's not technically stealing content.

I sometimes think that people like Randy just intentionally want to ruin everything, just for the sake of being evil, and it has nothing to do with money (Konami also comes to mind here).

Quasar said:

Randy Bitchford

Hahahaha, genius pun.

MetroidJunkie said:

Has TerminX considered going the D-Touch route and just making a source port that the user has to provide a grp file to? Then he's not technically stealing content.

The best case scenario for that position would be a paid app with no game file, EDuke32 is not GPL nor is it Free Software.

Wasn't the source code released, though? He wouldn't be able to do all this crap if it wasn't.

Danfun64 said:

The best case scenario for that position would be a paid app with no game file, EDuke32 is not GPL nor is it Free Software.

What are you going on about? EDuke32 is GPL.

There's the constant issue of the Build code -- which is under a separate and annoying license -- but the architecture design is completely different from the Doom engine. In Build games, Build is basically a library: it handles a certain number of things but none of the game code goes in. The game code is entirely separate, and under the GPL.

Haha, woe and lawsuits over games. Android games even :P

Wow, I had no idea gearbox was this shitty.

Edit: Accidentally voted for ED32, disregard my vote. I didn't read the title of the poll...

CheeseOnTheMoon said:

Wow, I had no idea gearbox was this shitty.

Gearbox is shitty, and Randy P. may be a liar, but that does not mean, that he is wrong.

As far as i understand, TerminX means, that his contract with 3D Realms from 2015 IS valid, because Gearbox get the IP in 2015, when the settled-out-of-court case ended with an agreement between 3D Realms and Gearbox.

But Gearbox bought the IP in 2010, when 3D Realms went nearly out of business. Unclear is, what was included in this deal, and what wasn't. And it is unclear too, what was the deal between Gearbox and 3D Realms in 2015. We don't know, and i guess TerminX doesn't know too. But Randy P. and Scott Miller should know.

Tricky situation for TerminX. He can pull it through, but if Gearbox is right, he is definitely fucked up, when they sue him. And even if he is right, if they case a copyright complain at googles PlayStore, they might take down the game, and he have to go to court. But this may need month, if not years if Gearbox pull it through all instances of courts.

cybdmn said:

Gearbox is shitty, and Randy P. may be a liar, but that does not mean, that he is wrong.

As far as i understand, TerminX means, that his contract with 3D Realms from 2015 IS valid, because Gearbox get the IP in 2015, when the settled-out-of-court case ended with an agreement between 3D Realms and Gearbox.

But Gearbox bought the IP in 2010, when 3D Realms went nearly out of business. Unclear is, what was included in this deal, and what wasn't. And it is unclear too, what was the deal between Gearbox and 3D Realms in 2015. We don't know, and i guess TerminX doesn't know too. But Randy P. and Scott Miller should know.

Tricky situation for TerminX. He can pull it through, but if Gearbox is right, he is definitely fucked up, when they sue him. And even if he is right, if they case a copyright complain at googles PlayStore, they might take down the game, and he have to go to court. But this may need month, if not years if Gearbox pull it through all instances of courts.

Oh well. Just have to wait it out and see what happens I guess.

If Randy's smart, he'll back off because it's clear that TerminX's disability is going to be used as sympathy and it's going to look bad on Gearbox's part if they take him to court over a license that, in all fairness, he obtained legitimately that they're trying to screw him out of. Even if they're in the right, is it really worth damaging their reputation just to stick it to some small fry developer whose project would only boost the Duke Nukem IP, unlike that piece of crap DNF that practically destroyed it?

MetroidJunkie said:

If Randy's smart, he'll back off because it's clear that TerminX's disability is going to be used as sympathy and it's going to look bad on Gearbox's part if they take him to court over a license that, in all fairness, he obtained legitimately that they're trying to screw him out of. Even if they're in the right, is it really worth damaging their reputation just to stick it to some small fry developer whose project would only boost the Duke Nukem IP, unlike that piece of crap DNF that practically destroyed it?

Randy will probably convince everyone he isn't actually disabled and that in some weird way Randy himself is actually disabled, and then claim it the rest of his life.

More on the subject:

http://techraptor.net/content/duke-nukem-dust-up-gearbox-vs-gobeille

That sums it up very well.

Gearbox...more like Turdbox. I definitely won't buy from them ever. I always thought they were a good company, but doing this to EDuke32 devs, is cruel. Its the best mod for DN3D, out there. If anything, they should be taking ideas from EDuke32 & making DNF into a better game from it, for more money, no? It seems like we live in a sue happy world. Oh well, hopefully good prevails. :-)

Looks like a case of "It's our way, or the highway, because we're big and you're nobody". I have no reason not to believe Richard - he's super passionate about Duke and his work plus he's too much of direct-to-point, no-bullshit guy to fabricate a manipulation story, while Gearbox, as we all know, has a history of "very unclear situations" to put it most mildly. No clear, rationally written statement from Gearbox or Randy doesn't help matters either. So I think it's just about imposing their own way - I don't think it's about money - They could easily work out a royalty deal which would guarantee them a buck as well and any realistic up-front payment would be chump change in comparison to their overall revenue.

It's really sad, GBX could easily just endorse the work done on EDuke32 for an easy win-win situation for everyone. Especially since, this part of the quote from the article:

"You’re one of the most knowledgeable people about Duke and you care about it. You should get to impact the new episode and weigh in on our engine updates."

...suggests a potential new release for classic Duke. If they are in conflict with Richard/Eduke32 Team then how are they going to do it? Use the DOS executable? :P Or are they stupid enough to expect to catch up with ~13 years (iirc) of engine improvements, bug fixing and modern OS adaptation on their own in a mere few months? Megaton Edition port uses Richards and Jonof's code too so if they wanted to base on that they would have to deal as well.

I hope the internet backlash will be enough to solve this situation. And if they decide to sue a disabled man with no money because of a conflict over a game from 1996... We all should rethink if we really want to support a company that acts like this.

Knowing how these things work based on my own experience, they likely wanted to renegotiate for an extremely tiny flat payment contract w/o any respect to hours worked, or the actual profit made, and the original agreement is probably significantly better than that (retention of a profit percentage, for example).

Game publishers think that programmers just bend over and fart out rainbow clouds of code that make a game magically work, and should thus be paid equivalently (ie., shit).

^ I agree with you there.

Still, if Gearbox holds the legal rights in all cases, this is a moot point, regardless of Randy Pitchford's behavior. Guess we will have to wait and see. Doesn't help that the Build engine is license-hell, either...

Randy could just say that part of the agreement was that Gearbox retained the rights to old Duke Nukem games, making the license void, but his silence seems to suggest that Gearbox has no such thing and he's just trying to intimidate Richard because he thinks that owning future Duke Nukem games means he owns the complete brand. I still find it funny how he told Richard he was protecting the IP, yet he doesn't seem to realize that Duke Nukem Forever did a pretty piss poor job holding up the brand name and he's probably one of the few people who actually likes the game as a whole.

I liked DNF. Maybe because I didn't play many games around that point in my life to begin with...nothing to compare it to :)

Randy's silence could mean lawyers got involved at this point. You know, like a gag order..

I also liked DNF, while it had more than its fair share of flaws and obviously couldnt live up to the hype it was still a fun game to blast through (Variety of gameplay and weapons, the ego system, interaction of the environment and the many minigames just to name a few positives)
I actually find its kind of underrated.

With DNF I didn't so much like its gunplay besides for the regen health, and the game started to get very dull for me midway through that I had to force myself to play the rest of the thing. I tried playing the game a second time but just couldn't do it for long as it really bored me.