Sony has filed a lawsuit against Chinese Tech giant Tencent in a California federal court. In the lawsuit filed last Friday, the PlayStation maker accused the publisher behind PUBG: Battlegrounds of ripping off the Horizon video game series in its upcoming game “Light of Motiram”. Sony called the upcoming game a “slavish clone” that copies several distinctive Horizon elements.
“Tencent’s copying of Horizon is so blatant that the public has described it as ‘crazy’, ‘insane’, and ‘shameless’,” Sony wrote in the lawsuit. “Tencent also used its rip-off of the iconic Horizon main character ‘Aloy’ as the centerpiece of its pre-release marketing and promotional strategy, deliberately causing numerous game lovers to confuse Light of Motrium as the next game in the Horizon series when encountering Tencent’s promotional game play videos on social media accounts.”
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Light of Motiram is being developed and published by Polaris Quest, a video game developer and subsidiary of Tencent Games. The game challenges players to explore the vast open world, build their operation bases, and train Mechanimals that will help them take on formidable bosses.
A side-by-side cover art of Horizon Zero Dawn and Light of Motiram has an uncanny similarity that, like Sony pointed out in the lawsuit, can easily confuse fans of the Horizon franchise into thinking that Light of Motiram is a new entry in the series.
Sony rejected a Horizon pitch from Tencent
On page 22 of the lawsuit, Sony said that “Light of Motiram is the result of the development project that Tencent previously pitched to SIE for licensing”, which they rejected.
“The Light of Motiram Promotional Material reflects that even though SIE rejected Tencent’s pitch to create a licensed Horizon Franchise game, Tencent continued to produce a game that makes unauthorized use of SIE’s rights in the Horizon Franchise intellectual property”.
While smaller studios releasing clones or rip-offs of popular franchises is not new (happened with Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and Black Myth: Wukong), seeing the same behavior coming from a subsidiary of a major gaming conglomerate is a new low.
Do you think Sony has presented a strong argument with the lawsuit that gives it a clean shot at winning? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
