Star Citizen's lengthy and heavily crowd-funded development has been marked by numerous changes to the project's direction and scope , including a move from Crytek's CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard in late 2016. That change is now the focus of a lawsuit from Crytek, which accuses Star Citizen developers Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for Central California, lays out how RSI agreed to work exclusively with CryEngine in a 2012 agreement, an agreement it says was broken when RSI moved to Amazon's Lumberyard engine in late 2016.

In a blog post following that transition, RSI's Chris Roberts explained that Lumberyard was essentially a more promising fork of an earlier CryEngine build that fit better as a base for "StarEngine," his name for the "heavily modified" version of CryEngine the developers were then using. "Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are," Roberts wrote.

In its complaint, though, Crytek says its agreement with RSI and CIG laid out that CryEngine would be the exclusive engine used for the game and that RSI would "display Crytek trademarks and copyright notices in the Star Citizen video game and related marketing materials." Crytek says it offered the developers "a below-market license rate" on CryEngine and "invested significant time and expense in creating impressive demonstrations and proofs-of-concept" to help with the game's initial crowdfunding campaign in exchange for this exclusivity deal.

Crytek also accuses RSI and CIG of breaking their agreement by using CryEngine on the standalone Squadron 42, a spin-off, single-player campaign announced in late 2015 that Crytek says was not covered by the original contract. Crytek further alleges that RSI did not provide promised CryEngine bug fixes mentioned in the contract and shared confidential pieces of CryEngine code in a "BugSmashers" video series.

“We are aware of the Crytek complaint having been filed in the US District Court,” a spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ars Technica. “CIG hasn’t used the CryEngine for quite some time since we switched to Amazon’s Lumberyard. This is a meritless lawsuit that we will defend vigorously against, including recovering from Crytek any costs incurred in this matter.”

Still waiting

The lawsuit is another problematic wrinkle for the extremely ambitious and long-delayed Star Citizen, which released a third alpha version to a small subset of backers in October . The game has now raised over $173 million in crowdfunding from nearly 2 million backers, leading to a panoply of stretch goals expanding the size and scope of the online space-faring simulation since its original $6.3 million Kickstarter in 2012

Some players have tired of waiting for RSI and CIG to live up to their vision, though, including a group that is tracking 522 separate developer promises that are overwhelmingly still unfulfilled or broken at this point. Roberts has been pushing back on allegations of feature creep since 2015 , though, calling "bullshit" on demands for a "less impressive game" that meets "artificial deadlines."