Gearbox wants out of Aliens: Colonial Marines lawsuit

Developer Gearbox is arguing that claims against it in an Alien: Colonial marines lawsuit should be dropped.

Last year a suit was filed claiming that Gearbox and Sega falsely advertised the game owing to the visual and design disparity between pre-release footage and the final shipped titles.

Polygon reports that lawyers have filed a request that responsibility be placed squarely at the feet of publisher Sega as it had the final say on the game’s development.

"Gearbox never belonged in this lawsuit," it reads. "Gearbox is a video game software developer. It was neither the publisher nor seller of the video game at issue.

For more than a year, Gearbox has quietly abided the plaintiffs’ claims so that Sega, the game’s publisher and the party responsible for the game’s marketing and sale, could assume the defence of this lawsuit. Gearbox has honoured its publisher’s request in spite of plaintiffs’ highly publicized and highly misplaced claims against Gearbox. At this point, however, Gearbox is obligated to pursue its rightful departure from this case."

Gearbox’s new filing goes on to say that it injected a sum of cash totalling millions [of dollars]” into the game’s development, adding that none of it was ever repaid”.

Furthermore, the game never sold enough to trigger any additional sales-based payments, meaning the only money Gearbox received was linked to development milestones.

It also says that the pre-release trailers were made using the same engine – Unreal – as the final shipped product.