ARK: Survival Evolved could be temporarily shut down by lawsuit

Studio Wildcard's open-world dinosaur game, ARK: Survival Evolved, has seen plenty of success even though it hasn't made a full release. The game is currently in Early Access on both Steam and the Xbox One,  and has been receiving some fairly large updates recently.

While the game's success is uncontested, the developers behind the game are being sued by the Dungeon Defenders developer, Trendy Entertainment – according to court documents acquired by Kotaku.

Long story short, the lawsuit, which "reads more like a salacious tabloid story" according to Studio Wildcard, claims that a former Trendy employee breached his contract with Trendy to work on Survival Evolved, a competitor to Dungeon Defenders, in secret. In addition to that, Trendy claims the former developer poached developers and used 'trade secrets' from Trendy on Survival Evolved.

Trendy wants Studio Wildcard to pay them a lump sum of money or meet them in court. If the developers go to court in April, ARK: Survival Evolved will be taken off the PC and Xbox One until the case has settled.

The real question here is how does an open-world Survival Game compete against an action-RPG tower defense game and how it "had a devastating impact on Trendy's business."