The renown next-gen Unreal Engine 3 might not be reaching it’s full potential because of a monopoly that Epic has been trying to run on it. Silicon Knights,the developer for the upcoming 360 title Too Human have sued Epic, claiming that Epic focused on making Gears of War a success and neglected to support other developers with their own UE3 based games.

“Rather than provide support to Silicon Knights and Epic’s other many licensees of the Engine, Epic intentionally and wrongfully has used the fees from those licenses to launch its own game to widespread commercial success while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games.”

Apparently, part of the agreement states that Epic was obligated to provide a “functional Engine” for the 360, March 2006, six months after the development kits for the Xbox 360 were made available on September ’05. Silicon Knights says that funding for Too Human would have been pulled if the project didn’t have a working engine, so they resorted to creating their own “Silicon Knights Engine”. This is why Too Human was delayed.

Silicon Knights also blames the defective Engine for the poor E3 2006 demo of Too Human.

“That advantage was nowhere more evident than at E3 2006, where Gears of War was awarded “Best Game in Show” and garnered nothing but laudatory press. By contrast, Silicon Knights – one of the only other [Unreal Engine 3] developers to publicly display a playable demonstration of its game – saw Too Human roundly criticized in the videogame press for its technical problems and generally unpolished appearance. The damage to Silicon Knights caused by Epic’s misconduct was manifest, because E3 attendees were able to compare Too Human with another game running ostensibly the same game engine, Gears of War, with vastly superior results.”]