As MMO early access launches go, the release of Myth of Empires has certainly been the weirdest. First arriving to our radar at the beginning of the year and releasing to Steam early access this past November, the combination survival sandbox and real-time strategy title was suddenly taken down from Steam due to a claim of copyright infringement from ARK: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard and publisher Snail Games.
Myth’s studio Angela Game has since swung back at the companies, filing a lawsuit with the Central District of California this past Thursday, as first reported by MMO Fallout. The suit seeks a declaratory judgment of non-liability for copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation in a jury trial, which effectively means that Angela Game wants the case to be heard by a jury in court. The suit also seeks damages from Snail Games over the infringement accusation along with lawyer fees and legal costs.
As part of the filing, Angela Game lawyers included two pieces of evidence that feature a letter and code examples from both ARK and Myth sent from Snail Games to Valve. The filing argues that Snail Games’ complaint to Valve “does not present any material or substantial quantity of Myth of Empires software code, but attaches a document that misleadingly presents, out of order, an extremely small set of ‘names’ that exist in Myth of Empires source code; and omits software code that actually drives the operation of [the game].”
Whether Studio Wildcard or Snail Games will respond is something that will have to be answered in time, but for now it would appear that this legal battle is just getting started.
