Light of Motiram, Tencent’s upcoming survival game, is the subject of a lawsuit from Sony, who calls the game a “slavish clone” of its open-world RPG franchise Horizon. Looking at the two side-by-side, the comparison is pretty damning, it utilizes both the tribal, prehistoric aesthetic of Horizon, and the roaming mechanical animals that have become synonymous with Guerrilla Games’ series. Now that Sony has served papers, Tencent is arguing that the PlayStation company is trying to monopolize open-world genre conventions, and that Light of Motiram looks like dozens of other games, actually.
TheGamePost reports that Tencent has filed the motion to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that Sony is trying to use the power of the law to take a “well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it [the company’s] domain.”
“Sony’s Complaint tellingly ignores these facts. Instead, it tries to transform ubiquitous genre ingredients into proprietary assets,” Tencent alleges. “By suing over an unreleased project that merely employs the same time-honored tropes embraced by scores of other games released both before and after Horizon—like Enslaved, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Far Cry: Primal, Far Cry: New Dawn, Outer Wilds, Biomutant, and many more—Sony seeks an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions.”
You can read more about the arguments Tencent makes in TheGamePost’s write-up, but the summary is that the company argues that Horizon isn’t as unique as Sony claims in the lawsuit. It even points to a statement made in NoClip’s Horizon documentary by Guerrilla art director Jan-Bart Van Beek indicating that the studio had its own reservations about the game’s originality, with Van Beek saying it seemed very similar in some ways to Ninja Theory’s 2010 action game Enslaved. Tencent also argues that the entire lawsuit is based on hypotheticals, as the game isn’t slated to launch until 2027, and thus might not look anything like Horizon by the time it launches. Tencent and Light of Motiram developer Polaris Quest scrubbed the game’s Steam page of images that featured a red-haired protagonist similar to Aloy from Horizon last month.
