According to Trendy Entertainment, its Ex-Creative Director Jeremy Stieglitz breached a contract with the company when he began working on ARK after leaving Trendy Entertainment in 2014. Stieglitz allegedly ran into problems at Trendy Entertainment and sought to part with the company. As part of an agreement, he signed a non-compete agreement that would keep him from directly trying to compete with his former company for a year. According to the lawsuit though, Trendy Entertainment claims that Stieglitz began approaching Trendy Entertainment employees with a new project within a month of his departure from the company.
Regardless of whether or not Stieglitz broke his contract with Trendy Entertainment, there remains another question about how much influence Stieglitz actually had on the development of ARK. According to PC Gamer, Studio Wildcard denies that Stieglitz had any major involvement in ARK other than consulting. If Stieglitz was not a major part of the development of ARK, then Trendy Entertainment's lawsuit would not be able to affect ARK since the company had a contract with Stieglitz and not Studio Wildcard.
Unfortunately, if Trendy Entertainment's injunction against Studio Wildcard is approved, the company may be forced to stop development on the game or even remove it from Steam until the lawsuit is decided. This would be quite a blow to the company considering they just released a new game mode for the game titled ARK: Survival Of The Fittest. This new free-to-play game mode is similar to the player versus player survival arena games like H1Z1: King of the Kill and The Culling, which I discuss in a previous post.
A court hearing will be held on April 27 in the Eight Judicial Circuit of Florida to decide on the approval or denial of Trendy Entertainments temporary injunction.
No comments:
Post a Comment