Business of Esports TV: Another Epic Lawsuit

(Livestream #132)

In this segment, we discuss Epic’s lawyers going after AR company Nreal over their name.

The Business Of Esports brings you news, debates, and all the information you need to know about the gaming sector, the world’s fastest-growing market. With Paul “The Profit” Dawalibi leading the charge, and a variety of special guests, BoE TV is the only place to find insider information on the esports industry!

Check out the full livestream here:

Paul Dawalibi 53:23
Let’s let’s talk about epic here guys. More lawsuits from Epic Games. Not not much of a story here. Just interesting sort of distraction kind of story. And the headline is epic game Sue’s AR company and real for sounding too much like unreal. It claims n reals name is virtually identical to the Unreal, unreal engines. So epic which who’s in a huge lawsuit with apple? decides they now want to go after China based enrile who that makes a virtual reality headset for having a name that’s too similar. Now, there’s not a ton of to discuss your guys, right? We don’t want to unpack the lawsuit and the specifics or anything like that. But like, do we think at this point epic is just majorly distracted with all this? Or is this just

Jeff Cohen 54:25
like, I think this is like something the lawyers bring? Like this probably spent 10 minutes on Tim Sweeney’s mind and it’s like hey, there’s this these people in China sounds like our name should we try to sue that? Yeah, like you got you know, here’s here’s like, a million bucks like go knock yourself out like sue them. That’s right. I don’t think this is like a distract the apple we’ve covered i think that that was your IT strategy. That seems to be backfiring. But, you know, it’s it’s actually wild. Like I was looking through some of the documents that came out from all I mean, It’s not surprising or shouldn’t be surprising, but just the amount of planning that went in, like, they don’t think that they got into this and they’re like, Oh, we had no idea how Apple was gonna react or what was gonna happen. Like, they planned out exactly what they were going to do, how Apple was going to respond and what was going to happen. Now, we can say that it hasn’t gone well. But they went into the eyes wide open and kind of like wargame that out to sort of impressive fashion. I thought at least this I don’t think you know, was that is that big of a deal. But,

Paul Dawalibi 55:34
but But hold on, let me just put things like, let me try and make it feel more like a deal. Okay. Which is your you’re in this big apple lawsuit. Okay, you’re Tim Sweeney. And a big part of this is like, is sort of being decided in the court of public opinion. Right? You want epic wants to look like the little guy standing up for the little guy. Right? Taking on the big bad apple? And and and if you know that, ideally, I would think they want people to get behind that right? Why go and Sue some little company in China, right? over something that has probably zero impact on your business, like no one was like, oh, like, let me go down.

Jeff Cohen 56:21
I was doing my game on Unreal Engine.

Paul Dawalibi 56:25
Like it’s no zero impact on their business, but yet makes them seem not like a bully, but like,

Lindsay Poss 56:31
I’m happy.

Paul Dawalibi 56:33
Right? And so in the context of needing goodwill from the public. It’s not that the goodwill from the public is gonna help them win the lawsuit, but it definitely won’t hurt. Right? Why do this, Lindsay, do you feel like again? Is it just kind of misguided or mistimed?

Lindsay Poss 56:52
I don’t know if I don’t know. Because it doesn’t, it doesn’t come across Well, it comes across as petty and it comes across as like epic will fight anyone over anything. Like it’s not the best move. And and I think, Jeff, I think what you said is probably right, like I spent 10 minutes on Tim Tim Sweeney’s mind. And, you know, then he moved on from it. But at the same time, it’s getting news coverage, and we’re talking about it, which means that it got out to the general public. And this is the time when we’re all talking about epic anyway. So any moves that you do are going to be newsworthy, and this just feels completely unnecessary. It’s just maybe if they weren’t in the middle of a lawsuit with Apple, I bet he whatever, it’s epic, silly. But now it’s like, it’s funny. Why are you doing that? Like go do other stuff.