To recap the messy Snail Games/Angela Game legal tussle: In early December, Angela Game’s Myth of Empires was delisted from Steam following what appeared to be a DMCA request. It was soon revealed that the request was made by Snail Games, publisher of Ark: Survival Evolved, for what it considered to be theft of its source code by a former employee of Snail Games. In response, Angela Game sued Snail Games, saying basically, “nuh-uh, we didn’t do anything wrong and you’re hurting our business by saying we did.”
Now that you’re caught up with what happened in 2021, here’s what’s going on in 2022. MMO Fallout reports that Snail Games has filed a countersuit, claiming that Angela Game has “repeatedly revised its Myth of Empires code, removing or revising code headers and other copied elements” to “cover its theft,” following the DMCA takedown. “Angela had no reason to do this, other than to erase evidence of its misconduct,” Snail Games alleges.
Snail also alleges that, while 60 of Angela Game’s 82 employees were previously employed by Snail Games, none of them worked on the Ark source code, so the similar file names are not an example of a programmer simply using names that he is comfortable with. One of those employees was apparently responsible for backing up the Ark source code to a server in the United States.
Snail isn’t just going after Angela. The suit also names Imperium Interactive Entertainment Ltd., which made the distribution agreement with Valve that put Myth of Empires on Steam. Finally, Tencent is also a target, as Snail Games believes it “indirectly owns a substantial interest in Angela” and “refuses to take down” the game from its servers,” and because it “has actual knowledge of specific infringement, and refuses to take simple steps to end the infringement, Tencent is liable for contributory copyright infringement.”
