It looks like Sony’s achieved what it wanted and nuked Horizon copycat Light of Motiram from the Internet, as it’s agreed a “confidential settlement” with creator Tencent and the case has been closed.
Confirmation comes courtesy of court documents submitted on Wednesday, dismissing proceedings due to an undisclosed agreement between the two colossal companies.
Light of Motiram – the game which PlayStation’s lawyers accused of being a “slavish clone” – has since seen its Steam and Epic Games Store pages nuked, although its official website remains online for the time being.
Subscribe to Push Square on YouTube166k
While neither company is likely to ever disclose the details of the settlement, Sony’s primary motivation with this lawsuit was to prevent Tencent’s game from ever releasing. It looks like it’s achieved its goal.
The outcome is surprising, though, because the two firms had been engaged in a brutal back-and-forth, with PlayStation arguing Light of Motiram threatened to devalue its brand, while Tencent said the platform holder was seeking “an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions”.
The case had been scheduled to go to court in January, but we’d speculate given these latest developments that Tencent’s lawyers weren’t particularly confident about the outcome.
Sony’s aggressive assault on Light of Motiram has become clearer in recent weeks, of course, due to the announcement of PC and mobile MMO Horizon Steel Frontiers by Korean company NCSoft.
We know Tencent repeatedly tried to pitch PlayStation on a smartphone adaptation of the Horizon franchise, which Sony claims morphed into Light of Motiram after its pitches were declined.
It’s quite a sudden and unexpected conclusion to this saga, but we suspect PlayStation’s legal team will be the happier of the two parties, as all it ever really wanted was to get this project shut down.
With its various PC storefront pages now nixed, it looks like mission accomplished for Sony and its army of lawyers.