@esqueejy: It's simply not a game type that appeals to everyone, thats all.

@gamingdevil800: Would be playing with different groups of friends, so it's a pretty different game.

I think it's funny that so many think this sort of concept should be able to have a monopoly.

Imitation and competition breeds diversity and innovation, both of which are good for gamers.

If EQ had been able to have a legal monopoly on the MMO model (or whatever came before them) we never would have had WoW (though some might argue that's a good thing), and would never really have had the MMO genre.

If the DotA game mode had been monopolised in WC3, we never would have had MOBAs like LoL or DotA 2.

Paladins might have no original thoughts, but I think we should be encouraging others to adopt the Battleground format, as long as they don't strictly copy it and try to innovate to make it better.

@lostn: If he took no code, but built an identical solution at Oculus to what he had built at Zenimax, it is still corporate espionage and/or IP theft.

@adayinverse: Gamespot trolls are fkn morons man. So much hate for Eddie Makuch and GS itself for no real reason, even ignoring facts.

@barcaazul: I believe a significant part of this was IP theft and establishing guilt over it, and yet to come is preventing sale and royalties. They never sued with royalties in mind originally, so they can't be awarded them.

@nikolistary: While they may not have been developing a VR headset specifically, as noted in another comment - real time rendering is an immense hurdle in VR tech, and was something that Zenimax is constantly working on. Whether their work was intended for VR or not doesn't matter - Carmack took this work to use elsewhere.

One of the biggest reasons to sue in IP law, is not even for the money. Take Zenimax vs "Scrolls" for example. You must establish that you are actively protecting your IP from threats such as copyright and trademark infringement, otherwise if you let something slide then there is prior fact for someone else doing the same in future. While it wouldn't be a great stance, if Zenimax let this go without a fight, and some other company heard about it, they could potentially take some of Zenimax's work, use it, and then justify it with "But Zenimax let them do it". Hell, they could take the exact same stuff that Carmack took, start their own VR company, and suggest that Zenimax doesn't care about it because they didn't defend it against Oculus.

@spaced92: Here's the thing. Carmack was working on a VR project, and could possibly have been doing some VR work in downtime while at work. Virtually every employee contract in existence will state that anything you create related to your work, while at work, while using company equipment to do so, belongs to the company.

@NikoKun: If you start with 100 lines of code, build that up to 10,000 functional lines, and then alter the original 100, how much of the work is directly a result of that 100 lines? That's pretty much the question being asked moving forward.

@yogibbear: "The title is incorrect because I'm not going to read and see if it is correct, and so it is clearly clickbait because I said so" yogibbear 2017.

The article states that a portion of the code used in the Rift was admitted to coming from Zenimax, and so Zenimax could (possibly) request royalties for the use of their code, or otherwise inhibit sales.