Ark: Survival Evolved studio settles legal dispute over alleged code theft, and in a surprise twist they're now helping to 're-release' the game they said ripped them off
A dispute between Ark: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard and the makers of Chinese strategy game Myth of Empires has come to a happy ending, as all parties involved say they're now going to work together to «re-release» Myth of Empires on Steam and other platforms in early 2024.
The trouble began in December 2021, shortly after the launch of Myth of Empires on Steam, when Studio Wildcard noticed a number of similarities between that game and Ark that it believed were more than just a coincidence. Studio Wildcard developers then examined code headers in the Myth of Empires executable and said they found proof that it was actually built upon the Ark: Survival Evolved source code. Wildcard's parent company Snail Games alleged that the source had been stolen by «key employees» of Myth of Empires developer Angela Game, who had previously worked at Snail.
A summary of that evidence was presented to Valve, which removed the game from Steam on December 3. Angela Game responded by issuing a flat-out denial of the claims against it and then, a couple weeks later, filing a lawsuit to force Myth of Empires' return to Steam. Snail Games and Studio Wildcard fired back with further details about what it called a «brazen theft of Snail USA and Wildcard's intellectual property.»
That claim was bolstered by a statement by Bastian Suter, CEO of anti-cheat maker BattlEye, who said his own independent investigation revealed that «Myth of Empires' executable contained several unique strings used by BattlEye integration code, which are also present in Ark. There are some slight changes to some of those strings, but those mostly consist of changing 'BattlEye' to 'BatEye' in almost all BattlEye references through the game.»
At that
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