Myth of Empires and ARK: Survival Evolved Devs Fight in Court
The conflict between the developers of Myth of Empires and ARK: Survival Evolved has moved to the courtroom. The case does not look good for Angela Game.
A few days ago Myth of Empires was unexpectedly pulled from Steam. The reason was the accusation that the game was created using stolen source code. Now we found out that the case has moved to the courtroom and the situation does not look good for the creators of the game, the people from Angela Game.
Recall that according to the accusations, Myth of Empires was to have used stolen source code of ARK: Survival Evolved. Snail Games, the owner of Wildcard, the studio responsible for the latter game, has requested Valve to remove Myth of Empires from distribution under the DMCA. Angela Games asked the court to temporarily block these actions and allow the game to return to distribution. Thanks to these legal procedures, quite a bit of new information regarding these accusations has hit the web.
Thanks to this, we learned that among the eighty people who developed Myth of Empires as many as 62 were previously employed by Snail Games. One of them was Yang Li Ping, who gained access to the closely guarded source code of ARK: Survival Evolved in November 2018, and left the company a few months later to start his own studio. In addition, since the removal of Myth of Empires from Steam, Angel Game's team was said to have made numerous changes to the game's code, designed to hide the true source of these elements.
The most important evidence, however, is the opinion of BattleEye, a company providing anti-cheat solutions. It analyzed the code of Myth of Empires and found sequences that integrate this system with ARK: Survival Evolved. Even some spelling mistakes are repeated. This is important because the developers of each game that uses this technology create its own unique version. So these elements could not be found in Myth of Empires in any other way than being copied from ARK: Survival Evolved.
In court documents, Snail Games is requesting that Angela Game be secure to keep all versions of the code of Myth of Empires to protect against changes being made to hide the developers' guilt. In addition, the company wants an independent third party to investigate the similarities between this game and ARK: Survival Evolved. Angela Game, on the other hand, denies all accusations and claims that elements such as names cannot be copyrighted and therefore the elements pointed out by Snail Games do not prove anything.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that although Myth of Empires can no longer be purchased on Steam, those who have managed to purchase it can continue to play, because the servers are still running. Yesterday, at the hottest moment of the day, 29 thousand users played the title on Steam.
