Rune II publisher sued ZeniMax and Bethesda for $100 million

The publisher of Ragnarok Game continues to sue the former developers of Rune II. Now ZeniMax and Bethesda have been included in the $100 million lawsuit as defendants, accusing the companies of collusion, breach of contract and sabotage.Brief chronology of the conflict

Rune II, developed by Human Head Studios, was released on October 12, 2019.

• The very next day, the company announced its closure, and all its employees moved to the new Roundhouse studio under the leadership of Bethesda;for Ragnarok, such actions came as a surprise, since the publisher expected that Rune II would be supported and refined after release;
• despite various bugs and not fully fulfilled terms of the contract, the publisher paid Human Head the required $ 3.5 million.;
• the developers refused to transfer the source code to Ragnarok, which, together with the unauthorized closure, served as the main reason for the lawsuit;
• as a result, the company managed to return the hard drives with the necessary data through the court in order to continue working on Rune II;
• On October 20, Ragnarok expanded the lawsuit to include Bethesda and ZeniMax.
• At the same time, the documents do not mention Microsoft, which bought the aforementioned companies for $ 7.5 billion.What is sabotage?

in court documents, the transfer of Human Head employees to a new studio without the publisher’s knowledge is called a “de facto merger of two conspiratorial companies”;

• the publisher calls the formation of a new company, as well as the refusal of former developers to fulfill the terms of the contract and transfer the source code, sabotage.
• At the same time, Ragnarok claims that Human Head deliberately hid information about its closure from the company;”The long—awaited release of Rune II was maliciously thwarted by collusion between money-hungry developers and a major video game conglomerate that is determined to eliminate threats to their game franchises,” the lawsuit says.;
• the publisher claims that Human Head secretly gave Bethesda the keys for private access to the game.
• This allegedly allowed the company to see Rune II as a direct threat and competitor to Skyrim. Such actions of developers in the lawsuit are regarded as “betrayal”;Ragnarok stated that five days before the release of Rune II, ZeniMax asked developers to stop working on the project.
• According to the publisher, these actions were aimed at maximizing the damage;the lawsuit also states that the assets and source code obtained were unusable.
• The requested amount of $100 million is based on breach of contract, fraud, misrepresentation and other accusations against companies.

In addition to Rune II, the lawsuit mentions a game based on the Oblivion Song comic book series, which Human Head also developed for Ragnarok.

Studio 369 took over the revision of Rune II. On November 13, an expanded edition of the game will be released on Steam, the description of which says in plain text that the project was originally “abandoned and sabotaged by developers.”

Bethesda and other companies have not yet commented on the new Ragnarok lawsuit.

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