Tencent Responds to Sony Lawsuit That Claims Light of Motiram Rips Off Horizon Series

by
William D’Angelo
, posted 15 hours ago / 1,363 Views

Sony in July of this year filed a lawsuit in California federal court against Tencent that  alleges Tencent has ripped off Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Horizon series of video games with Light of Motiram.

The lawsuit claims Light of Motiram is a “slavish clone” that copies several elements from the Horizon series. This includes identical gameplay, story themes, artistic elements, as well as other similarities. The company also states it declined an offer from Tencent last year to collaborate on a new Horizon game.

Tencent has now filed its response to the lawsuit and has filed the motion to dismiss, according to The Game Post.

“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,” reads the complaint.

“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 said that Sony’s claim that the Horizon series was “like no fictional world created before [or] since” as “startling” and “flatly contradicted” by Sony’s own developers. 

“In Sony’s telling, Horizon Zero Dawn is ‘like no fictional world created before [or] since,'” said Tencent. “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.”

Tencent added, “Sony’s Complaint tellingly ignores these facts. Instead, it tries to transform ubiquitous genre ingredients into proprietary assets.

“By suing over an unreleased project that merely employs the same time-honored 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—Sony seeks an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions.”

Tencent also alleges Sony already knew the Horizon series wasn’t an original idea as a documentary on Horizon Zero Dawn featured art director Jan-Bart Van Beek admitting the premise of the game has been done before with 2013’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

“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,” reads the complaint from Tencent.

“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.

“Mr. Van Beek warned, ‘I don’t think we should do this; it touches too much of these other points,’ referring to prominent elements of Enslaved. Sony shelved the project—only to revive it later with full awareness that the idea was far from novel. When Horizon Zero Dawn finally launched in 2017, the gaming community noted its striking resemblance to Enslaved and other genre staples.”

Light of Motiram is an open-world game that features colossal machines. It is in development for the PlayStation 5, PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, iOS, and Android.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.

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