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Judge Calls For End Of ZeniMax/Oculus Legal Battle

by Jamie Feltham • June 22nd, 2017

One of the biggest stories of 2017 for the VR industry is also one of its longest. The year started out with ZeniMax Media taking Facebook-owned Oculus to court over an alleged theft of technology. A jury eventually ruled that Oculus must pay ZeniMax $500,000,000, but that wasn’t the end of things — ZeniMax wants more.

Shortly after the trial, we learned that the company, which owns videogame publisher and developer Bethesda, filed an injuction for the Rift to be removed from sale. This week, the company asked a South Texas court to either carry out that request or for Oculus to pay it 20% in royalties of revenue for the next 10 years. Court documents obtained by Ars Technica also reveal that the company requested damages paid to it were doubled, totalling $1 billion.

Facebook, of course, is disputing the requests. In its own filing, it noted that “ZeniMax does not offer any products that compete with Oculus’s virtual-reality platforms and headsets.”

Interestingly, in the past week we’ve learned that Bethesda is developing VR versions of Doom and Skyrim in addition to the upcoming VR port of Fallout 4. None of these games are officially coming to the Rift at this time, instead releasing on rival platforms like the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (PSVR).

Facebook’s arguments were largely in-line with the many complaints and statements its made following the trial’s verdict. The company argued that no evidence existed to suggest Oculus had damaged ZeniMax’s financials in any way. Following the court ruling, Oculus’ John Carmack said that people would have “viciously mocked” the analysis. Carmack, who previously worked at Bethesda-owned id Software, was at the heart of the suit. ZeniMax claimed that the Rift had been built using its technology during the early days in which he collaborated with Rift inventor Palmer Luckey. An early prototype of the Rift debuted at Bethesda’s booth at E3 2012 running id’s Doom 3.

Law360, meanwhile, reports that US District Judge Ed Kinkeade simply called for an end to the ongoing legal battle, which appeared shortly after Oculus was acquired by Facebook in 2014. He asked the two to, “resolve the heck out of [this] big, hairy fight.”

Despite Kinkeade’s words, there doesn’t seem to be much sign of an end to Oculus and ZeniMax’s battle right now.

  • Well, thankfully it will end eventually. And I expect it will ultimately have little impact on the future of VR at Facebook/Oculus, because whatever the Oculus guys are supposed to have stolen/copied, there’s a whole load of other companies releasing VR headset out there right now–presumably legally–and I would think Oculus could simply release a new headset that uses much of the tech/solutions those other headsets are using, probably via few licenses and stuff, alongside whatever tech and software it actually developed itself, and then it could basically completely step around any future legal battles with Zenimax over VR. I don’t think it would matter if it has to specifically stop producing the first model of the Rift either, because I see no reason developers wouldn’t still be able to support it with software and the like going forward; Oculus just wouldn’t be able to put any more of them into the market. So, it is a pain in the ass, for sure, but I’m not particularly worried here either way. I do, however, want all of Bethesda’s games to come to the Rift, and asap.

    • Bundy

      It’ll end with Facebook writing a cheque. All this nonsense it just determining the amount.

      I’m not a big fan of either company, but the people who think that this is going to set Facebook on fire are deluded. Zenimax is worth less than Facebook’s last quarterly profit. I wish they’d just settle so we can all stop reading about it. The only ones suffering from all this are the folks who own an Oculus wondering what’s going to happen to the dozens of games in their library.

      • Yeah, that will probably be the long and short of it.

        • Robbie Cartwright

          Facebook can’t just buy Zenimax, can they? Not that they’d want to or anything, but is that even an option?

          • Bundy

            Zenimax isn’t publically traded. So a hostile takeover isn’t possible. But everything has a price. If Zuckerberg said, here’s 4 billion dollars to the owner(s), they’d probably take it.

            I believe they’re owned by Christopher Weaver and Robert Altman. Weaver was a programmer and Altman is a lawyer. Shortly after they made the company Altman had Weaver kicked out of it. Given how litigious Zenimax operates it’s really no surprise to see that they’re controlled by a lawyer.

    • Doctor Bambi

      The problem lies deep at the core of Oculus’ SDK so this would impact any headset they released in the future. In fact, the files in question were in place with the release of DK1. This is where Zenimax feels their code is being implemented unfairly by Oculus. So unless Oculus license a completely different SDK (which isn’t going to happen for a myriad of reasons), then they would need to find a way to rewrite those core pieces in a way that is completely separate from the methodologies Zenimax claims they wrote. This would require developers who have not seen the code coming in and doing a rewrite. Considering how core these files are to the entire code base, in terms of overall effort, they’d basically be rewriting the entire SDK.

      So that leaves us with Oculus coming to some kind of agreement with Zenimax. Hopefully that happens sooner rather than later because I think Oculus and Zenimax have a lot to gain working together as opposed to this headbutting.

      • i’m sure they just need to change the SDK for future headsets, and possibly change whatever parts for anyone planning to release on CV1.

      • koenshaku

        Yeah the price for ripping off tech when you are a corporate giant like facebook is a high one to pay. At least the sacked Palmer from the foul play in the deal.

  • I hope it will hand, but honestly I don’t believe it will be that easy