Turbine Sues Atari, Neverwinter Nights MMO Confirmed?

Joystiq is pointing to a PDF on Courthouse News outlining a lawsuit filed by Turbine against Atari over the further development and promotion of Dungeons & Dragons Online, among other things. With $30 million at stake, something tells me this is going to get ugly:

At issue is Turbine’s claim that Atari has “breached a licensing agreement” related to the development of the free-to-play Dungeons and Dragons Online Unlimited. Turbine says that while it has spent millions developing the franchise “and continues to invest money to operate and maintain the service,” Atari “acted unreasonably in its efforts to promote and distribute [Dungeons and Dragons Online] and failed to devote the necessary resources to it.”

So, Atari continued to accept payments (“including future royalty payments”) from Turbine for the Dungeons and Dragons Online “sublicense” though, Turbine alleges, Atari had a “strategy” to either “terminate Turbine as part of a shakedown” or “proceed with termination in bad faith to benefit from its own competing product at Turbine’s expense.” We can assume that “competing product” is Atari’s upcoming Champions Online MMO, being developed by its recently acquired in-house MMO dev Cryptic Studios.

Actually, my money is on the “competing product” being Cryptic’s rumored Neverwinter Nights MMORPG. Assuming Turbine knows something we don’t, I think the part about Atari’s “own competing MMO service based on the D&D and Advanecd D&D intellectual properties” confirms this previous rumor.

And while I wouldn’t be too happy about Atari’s plans to launch a competing D&D MMO if I were Turbine, you really can’t blame them for trying to move on after three years of little success.