Sony’s lawsuit against Horizon rip-off Light of Motiram has just taken a dramatic twist, as Tencent has fired back by claiming the platform holder “seeks an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions”.
The barbed response from the Chinese titan, read by The Game Post, follows a lawsuit submitted by PlayStation on 25th July, in which it described Tencent’s upcoming game as “shameless” and a “slavish clone”.
The Light of Motiram maker has now pushed back, arguing Horizon leverages “time-honoured tropes embraced by scores of other games released both before and after Horizon – like Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Far Cry: Primal, Far Cry: New Dawn, Outer Wilds, Biomutant, and many more”.
It added: “Sony seeks an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions.”
Tencent argues that PlayStation’s lawsuit is not a genuine effort to protect its intellectual property, but instead an attempt to stifle creativity from other companies.
It says:
“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.”
The Chinese firm also argues against Sony’s claims that Horizon is “like no fictional world created before or since” by citing comments made by Guerrilla Games prior to release.
It counters:
“In a behind-the-scenes documentary, the art director for Horizon Zero Dawn, Jan-Bart Van Beek, explained that the game’s core conceit – an intrepid, red-haired woman navigating the ruins of a shattered civilization overrun by robotic beasts – had already been executed by a different video game studio in the 2013 title Enslaved: Odyssey to the West”
Elsewhere, Tencent notes Sony has sued the wrong entity responsible for Light of Motiram, and wants the case to be thrown out as a consequence.
It says that the game is being developed by Polaris Quest, a subsidiary of Tencent Technology in Shanghai and Proximity Beta in Singapore. It argues that Tencent Holdings, the organisation Sony targeted, is just a parent company.
It therefore argues that claims of Tencent pitching a mobile version of Horizon to Sony in 2024 are irrelevant, as no members of Tencent Holdings were present for the meeting.
It adds:
“Even if the pitch meeting between Sony and other Tencent entities could somehow be attributed to Tencent Holdings, Sony has failed to make a prima facie showing that any actions at this meeting caused harm to Sony. Nothing that occurred at the San Francisco meeting – i.e., a request to a ‘license in the Horizon intellectual property’ – is alleged to be an act of copyright or trademark infringement.”
It concludes that Light of Motiram isn’t even expected to release until 2027, and Sony’s case is based on hypotheticals, as the look and style of the game could change.
It’s worth noting at this point that the developer has since scrubbed many of the game’s original art assets from its Steam page, and replaced them with images that don’t resemble Horizon at all.
It’ll be interesting to see how Sony responds to this, and what kind of drama unfolds as a consequence.
We’d argue that in the court of public opinion Tencent has already been found guilty, but whether that will hold under the eyes of the law remains to be seen.