Now, according to a report on Telegraaf.nl (via NeoGAF), a Dutch company called Genicap is claiming that it owns the patent for the “Superformula”.
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Hello Games said the game is so vast they may not even have any idea what is happening to other worlds in the game, while players are rumored to not even be able to meet each other throughout the course of the game – unless they are all getting closer to the center of the universe.
No Man’s Sky is getting closer to launching, but if an article in Dutch newspaper De Telegrhaff is accurate, it may be facing another legal problem. Genicap’s Jeroen Sparrow says they need to talk.
Genicap is said to have contacted Hello Games about the potential licensing issue, but is reportedly yet to receive a response. As attorney Mark Methenitis told Ars Technica, only the applications of a formula can be patented-not the formula itself, which you can play with online-and it’s actually a little unclear whether the formula used by No Man’s Sky violates the specific uses claimed in the patent held by Johan Gielis and his company, Genicap.
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No Man’s Sky’s remarkable 18 quintillion planets has amazed both players and developers worldwide, but it seems the game’s potentially award-winning equation may have been someone else’s. Last year, a feature from The New Yorker described how Murray utilizes Gielis’s formula: “Murray, sitting before his monitor, typed the Superformula into the terrain of a test planet…” What Hello Games did with the formula is very impressive. Should any additional information regarding this situation become available, we will update this story. Johan Gielis, the founder of Genicap and the one who discovered the superformula, is extremely proud. I reached out to Hello Games again to see if they want to comment but had not heard back at time of writing. This time, the game is possibly being sued, but not just for the name of the game, as a certain company from the Netherlands is claiming that Hello Games has stolen their game formula.
