Sony filed a lawsuit against Tencent over Light of Motiram, the latter’s upcoming game, which Sony alleges is a “shameless” copy of the Horizon titles. After first removing any potentially infringing content from stores, Tencent is now fighting back, accusing Sony of monopolizing common genre conventions.
As per Insider Gaming (via The Game Post), Tencent is requesting Sony’s lawsuit to be dismissed on the grounds of its “infringing” content being common genre conventions, which Sony is trying to monopolize and “fence off.”
“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 argued.
The company further pointed out how Sony’s claims and basis for the lawsuit are contradictory, since the latter claims Horizon: Zero Dawn and its sequel are unlike any game that came before or after them.
“In Sony’s telling, Horizon: Zero Dawn is ‘like no fictional world created before [or] since.’ That claim is startling, because it is flatly contradicted by Sony’s own developers, not to mention the long history of video games featuring the same elements that Sony seeks to monopolize through this lawsuit,” the company said.
The contradictions themselves come from what Tencent claims was a statement from Horizon: Zero Dawn art director Jan-Bart Van Beek. He allegedly said Horizon‘s core theme of a red-haired woman in an apocalyptic world run by machines and robots had been borrowed from another title, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, which released in 2013, which would dispel Sony’s claims of Horizon being one-of-a-kind.
Tencent named other games which it believes share a lot of DNA with Horizon, including “Enslaved, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Far Cry: Primal, Far Cry: New Dawn, Outer Wilds, and Biomutant,” following its accusation of Sony’s wanting to become “an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions.”
It additionally pointed out that Sony is pursuing legal action over “an unreleased project that merely employs the same time-honored tropes embraced by scores of other games released both before and after Horizon,” as part of that same desire to monopolize and fence-off competition by keeping common genre conventions to itself.
Lastly, Tencent pointed out Sony’s lawsuit was against the wrong corporate entities, as well as that Light of Motiram would not launch before 2027, making the company’s allegations frivolous and “based on hypotheticals.”
“The alleged infringements have not occurred and may in fact never occur,” it said.
Corporate legal battles are nothing new in video games. Claims of stolen assets, copyright infringements, and copying others’ works were already present in gaming, such as when Dark and Darker had to pull from most stores during its lawsuit with Nexon, the latter alleging its unreleased project was partly stolen by former devs who ended up making Dark and Darker.
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