Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, thinks that automated chatbots can be used to enrich games with auto-generated dialogue. But what he and his company don’t like, however, is the end user using bots to bring false life to lifeless server rooms so that user-created maps can earn money even if nobody’s actually playing them.
Two Michigan-based Fortnite creators, Idris Nahdi and Ayob Nasser, are at the center of a lawsuit filed by Epic Games that alleges they created 20,000 bots to falsely inflate the popularity of their maps (h/t comrade Hernandez at Polygon). And they weren’t just doing it because they were lonely and wanted thousands of bot friends. Generating engagement on Fortnite maps is akin to printing money, as Fortnite’s “Island Creator” program sees folks earn real cash for making genuinely cool stuff that appeals to genuine people. Create a cool island that attracts loads of players, and Epic will make it worth your while.
But alas, we live in a society with “rules.” And one of Fortnite’s creator program rules is that engagement is measured by real people playing the game. This is in addition to some pretty strict rules about intellectual property.
Epic Games alleges that the defendants were intentionally trying to circumvent the program’s terms of service, having bots flood their islands “using a cloud gaming service that allows users to play video games, like Fortnite, remotely.”
If true, it’s a computer abuse scheme that went on to earn the defendants tens of thousands of dollars. But Epic eventually caught on, cut them off and ordered the duo to stop playing the game and “destroy all copies of Fortnite” they currently had. The two apparently didn’t listen and continued playing Fortnite, and so now Epic is escalating things, alleging that:
Defendants’ conduct undermines Epic’s relationship with developers,…depriving legitimate developers of the full share of funds they otherwise would have received and eroding the trust Epic has built with them.
Epic Games is seeking financial recuperation, but also wants to ban not only these players but also their entire bloodlines from ever playing Fortnite again. No, I’m not being snarky and for once in my life it seems that I don’t need to be: The lawsuit literally wants to ban Nahdi and Ayob Nasser and their “heirs [and] successors” from playing Fortnite.
Rational behavior from rational people.
