Horizon

This afternoon, a choice of two raging videogame lawsuits to report on. Firstly, a snippet from the on-going courtroom scrap between former Unknown Worlds executives and Krafton over the state of Subnautica 2’s development, in which the former accuse the latter of changing their story about why the executives were fired.

I’ve decided not to write that one up because it feels like we are entering the realm of potshots over minutiae, rather than learning anything genuinely new about Subnautica 2 or its creators, but if you’re interested, GamesIndustry.biz has your back. The parallel Tencent/Sony bust-up has the virtue of relative novelty. It gives me a whole different kind of headache. What’s going on with this one, then?

Well, last November Tencent announced that they would publish Light Of Motiram, a post-apocalyptic adventure featuring robot mammoths, archery, red-haired ladies, and scrapmetal tribal aesthetics. An ungenerous commenter might assert that it’s a “slavish clone” of Sony’s Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West. That’s what Sony called it, anyway, when they announced in July this year that they were going to sue Tencent back to the Neo-Stone Age for copyright infringement.

In their California federal court filing, Sony alleged that Tencent had, in fact, approached them in 2024 and pitched a new Horizon game under license, even as development continued on Light of Motiram. As James noted in our write-up, the implication here is that Tencent were going to make their very own Horizon game regardless of whether Sony consented to brand it an official sequel or spin-off.

Sony sought to block Light Of Motiram’s release, arguing that it would cause “irreparable harm to SIE and the consuming public”, which is rather histrionic. I am picturing a solitary tear rolling down the face of a member of the Consuming Public as they plead with the storekeeper that they wanted the other 6/10 metal dinosaur game, not this one. Yes, it is I – the Horizon disliker. Still, I can’t deny that the games look rather similar, and it’s telling that Tencent have edited Light Of Motiram’s Steam page to remove some of the more obvious points of overlap with Horizon.

Tencent have now hit back against Sony’s accusations with even louder language. They contend that Sony are seeking “an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions”, and that Light Of Motiram ain’t even finished yet and as such, can’t be fairly assessed for what it invents or borrows. They also say that Sony are suing the wrong people.

As passed on by The Game Post, Tencent’s motion to dismiss the case comments that “at bottom, Sony’s effort is not aimed at fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property. It is an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it Sony’s exclusive domain.”

Tencent further argue that Sony’s claims for Horizon Zero Dawn’s originality have been “flatly contradicted” by developers Guerrilla, citing a behind-the-scenes doc in which art director Jan-Bart Van Beek compared the game to Ninja Theory’s 2013 action-adventure Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. They also make reference to “the long history of video games featuring the same elements that Sony seeks to monopolise through this lawsuit”.

They insist that Light Of Motiram “merely employs the same time-honoured 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”. In summary, they accuse Sony of trying to “transform ubiquitous genre ingredients into proprietary assets.”

As regards Sony’s argument that Tencent wanted to make a Horizon game for them, and decided to proceed with their “slavish clone” despite not being given permission, Tencent’s court motion refers to a GDC meeting from March 2024 in which Tencent reps pitched a licensed Horizon mobile game. They claim that since no actual Tencent executives or employees were at the meeting, nothing at the meeting “is alleged to be an act of copyright or trademark infringement”.

As for the ‘suing the wrong people stuff’, Tencent’s motion notes that Sony’s lawsuit is against Tencent America, Proxima Beta U.S., and Tencent Holdings, whereas Light Of Motiram is being developed and published by Polaris Quest / Aurora Studios, who operate under Tencent Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, and Proxima Beta PTE Ltd, a company in Singapore “doing business as ‘Tencent Games’ and/or ‘Level Infinite'”. Tencent’s lawyers are of the opinion that “Sony’s threadbare, conclusory allegations improperly lump these Defendants together with the foreign companies alleged to be responsible for the core conduct at issue.”

I’m no lawyer, despite belated efforts to educate myself, but the last two paragraphs read to me like Tencent are trying to get off on a technicality. I sympathise more with the line about Horizon not being as original as all that, and certain ideas being public property. Except that I’m pretty sure that if the roles were reversed and Light of Motiram had launched before Horizon: Zero Dawn, Tencent would have been yelling blue murder about breach of copyright.

The discussion of what Light Of Motiram – out 2027 – yoinks or doesn’t yoink from Horizon is kind of fun to follow, because it’s comparing ideas and aesthetics. In general, though, I default to the position that picking sides in a copyright spat between two billion dollar videogame publishers is like deciding which cybernetic T-Rex you most want to step on you.

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