Tencent have rebuffed Sony’s claims that Light of Motiram is a “slavish clone” of the Horizon franchise and that it copies multiple elements from they games that would confuse consumers. Sony asked the court to award unspecified damages and block the release of Light of Motiram, Tencent are asking for the whole thing to be thrown out of court.
“Plaintiff Sony has sued a grab-bag of Tencent companies—and ten unnamed defendants—about the unreleased video game Light of Motiram, alleging that the game copies elements from Sony’s game Horizon Zero Dawn and its spinoffs,” the complaint reads, according to TheGamePost.
“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.”
I won’t bore you with the rest of the legal waffle but the short version is that Tencent claim that elements such as a red-haired heroine, robotic creatures, and ruined cities are tropes that can be found in many video games, and they give examples such as Far Cry, BioMutant, and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Sony themselves published a Ninja Theory game with a red haired heroine, Heavenly Sword, but that doesn’t get a mention.
“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,” say Tencent.
That line about Sony’s own developers may be a problem for the PlayStation giant. Sony released a documentary about the making of Horizon Zero Dawn, and in it, Jan-Bart Van Beek, the art director for the game, references Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and suggests the new Horizon title is similar: “I don’t think we should do this; it touches too much of these other points.”
You can see that in the video below at 14m18s. Oops.
“Long before this lawsuit was filed, the developers of Horizon Zero Dawn publicly acknowledged that the very same game elements that, today, Sony claims to own exclusively, were in fact borrowed from an earlier game,” say Tencent. Enslaved is an action game with mechanical beasties set in a ruined landscape but the hero is male, the red-haired character, Trip, is not playable.
Looking at Enslaved at first glance it does resemble Horizon but I don’t think Tencent have much of a chance, Sony’s complaint isn’t really about claiming all the individual elements are their own, they are claiming the combination of all these things, along with the art style and music, make Light of Motiram a copy of Horizon. Their claim is comparable to a claim over music copyright; there are only so many notes and everyone uses them, but if you put them in the same order as someone else, then you are making a copy.
Tencent have recently wiped every similarity between Light of Motiram and Horizon from the Steam store page and removed all official videos of the game. References to world a “overrun by colossal machines” called “mechanimals” has been removed, as have all the shots of the beasts and the Aloy-like heroine.
Now, can we please, please have that remaster of Enslaved now?
Source: TheGamePost
lambchop
LOL, Tencent have been caught at it again. Dead Rip Off ALERT!