Yes it sucks that something like this would get to th point of litigation. But if Epic did make promises in the Silicon Knights contract that they did not live up to, then they have the right to fight for that. My guess that if the case has gone this far, they may have some grounds for it.
Which in turn opens the door to someone like Silicon Knights getting sued for every milestone they miss or bend; for every cut feature, level, character or weapon that was in the GDD everyone signed off on months before they started coding; for every multiplayer game whose servers end up supporting 2,500 people instead of the 3,000 stated in the TDD, etc. etc.
That's why this is a stupid thing to do to themselves and to the industry as a whole. With any luck they'll fall into a sinkhole before they manage to fuck the rest of us.
Actually they did end up building their own engine for the game Some Dude.
Did they? That doesn't make much sense as a solution to the alleged problem. There are no circumstances under which pulling an engine out of your ass is less costly than simply adding whatever it is they felt was missing from UE3. Lieutenant Columbo would have closed the book on that one before the first commercial break.
So what really happened is they figured they could shift the blame for their failure, get the money back and cry "woe is me!". That's my interpretation, anyway.
This comment was edited on Jan 24, 15:56.