It happens to non-game products too. Way back during a college internship, there was a third-party vendor that had by far the best algorithm for a hardware pro

It happens to non-game products too. Way back during a college internship, there was a third-party vendor that had by far the best algorithm for a hardware product my employer was producing. The product was pretty close to finished, when a former employer of the founder of the vendor sued them under a questionable non-compete contract and claimed that the algorithm was stolen (the company that filed suit had a significantly inferior algorithm based on the hardware product's criteria). Most of the development had to be scrapped, and a new, non-compete-free team was hired to build a clean room algorithm. There was a firewall inside the company where people on the old team practically couldn't even say hello to the people on the new team. And the new algorithm was decent, but not as good as the original vendor's algorithm.