A new Myth of Empires lawsuit was filed by developer Angela Game, as the dev battles to get their game back on Steam after a DMCA claim filed by the team behind Ark: Survival Evolved.
While the Myth of Empires lawsuit was filed (via PC Gamer), their hope is that the court order and DMCA claim be lifted and the game relisted. Snail Games and Studio Wildcard filed a lengthy response that alleges Angela Games are using stolen assets from Ark: Survival Evolved to create their game, Myth of Empires. The allegations range from copied character models all the way to stolen in-game assets like function names for features, and so on.
Angela Game still vehemently deny any wrongdoing and claim that the assets and features in question do not fall under any sort of copyright law, nor violate any fair use agreement precedence. Angela Games also stated that the DMCA claim caused “irreparable damage” to their brand and reputation and demand the game be restored back to Steam Marketplace for sales.
Snail Games, Wildcard Studio, and Angela Game don’t seem to be giving any ground on either argument.
A spokesperson for Snail Games even went as far as to say that the original wrongdoing occurred in 2018, when ex-Snail Games employee Yang Li Ping is now accused of allegedly logging into a secure server that only a few people had administrator access to – and proceeded to steal source code from Ark: Survival Evolved. He then left months later to start working for Angela Game, the studio behind Myth of Empires.
It’s also worth pointing out the lawsuit also alleges he did not work alone in his endeavors, due to all of the 82 people mentioned in the screen credits for Myth of Empires, 60 of them are all Snail Games employee names.
The CEO of BattlEye (a popular anti-cheat program) even weighed in, alleging that strings of code unique to Ark: Survival Evolve from their anti-cheat software are also found in the Myth of Empires source code as well. At this point, the situation will be continued through the court of law so it’s anyone’s guess as to what’ll happen.
We’ll keep you guys posted.
