A recent petition filed by Crytek in its lawsuit against star citizen maker Cloud Imperium Games says that Squadron 42, CIG’s promised narrative mode, has only been released this summer.
It’s a complicated legal maneuver that stems from the lawsuit launched by Crytek in 2017. Crytek claims that CIG violates the terms of a license agreement and continues to use CryEngine 3 code to develop Star Citizen and Squadron 42, the Cloud Imperium manages a separate game and not a Star Citizen module.
In 2016, Cloud Imperium announced it would switch from CryEngine 3 to Amazon’s Lumberyard development platform, which is itself part of CryEngine 3, which Amazon bought and developed. Crytek announced in its 2017 lawsuit that CIG actually uses CryEngine 3 code, for which it has no license.
Because Crytek’s act relies on CIG to launch a product without permission to use CryEngine code, Crytek’s claim cannot really go anywhere unless a disruptive product is released. Therefore, the company is asking a judge to postpone the lawsuit for the time being because it does not believe Squadron 42 will be released before or after the June 2020 date when this lawsuit was originally supposed to be in court. Crytek plans to postpone the process for October.
Crytek’s submission explicitly draws attention to the internal uncertainty of CIG when Squadron 42 will see the light, if at all. “While this surprised Crytek (and undoubtedly the public who paid Squadron 42 in advance), Crytek’s Squadron 42 claim is not yet ripe,” it says in the file that something must happen before Crytek files a lawsuit – in this one Fall the launch of Squadron 42.
The submission is an incremental development in a very technical confrontation, but provides third-party insight into Squadron 42’s development plan. The project will have been played by Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman, and Wing Commander alumni Mark Hamill and John Rhys-Davies Star Citizen started developing itself in 2012.
Cloud Imperium Games’ latest forecast when anything from Squadron 42 will be available to the public is that a beta could be released in the third quarter of this year. Star Citizen itself is still in alpha status, although more than $ 260 million has been donated since 2012.
In late 2018, Cloud Imperium announced that a private investor had leaked $ 46 million and were planning to launch the long-awaited game in summer 2020.
