‘That claim is startling’: Tencent fires back at Sony’s lawsuit accusing it of ‘cloning’ Horizon with Light of Motiram
Tencent accuses Sony of “an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture”
Tencent has responded to a Sony lawsuit which accuses its upcoming game Light of Motiram of being a “slavish clone” of the Horizon series.
In July, Sony filed a lawsuit in California federal court alleging copyright and trademark infringement, and claiming that Light of Motiram is so close to Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West that players could be confused into thinking it’s part of the same series.
The suit also alleges that, after starting work on Light of Motiram, Tencent then asked Sony if it wanted to collaborate on a new Horizon game, to which Sony declined. Sony claims that Tencent went ahead and made a Horizon-like game anyway.
Tencent has now responded to Sony’s lawsuit, calling the claims “startling” and accusing Sony of trying to monopolise a part of popular culture when – in Tencent’s view – Horizon wasn’t particularly original in the first place.
As reported by The Game Post, Tencent’s response suggests that by trying to sue it for Light of Motiram, Sony is failing to acknowledge that other games feature similar concepts.
“Sony’s complaint tellingly ignores these facts,” it claims. “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.”
The company claims that Sony’s lawsuit “is not aimed at fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property”, but is instead “an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it Sony’s exclusive domain”.
Tencent also alleges that Sony already knew Horizon wasn’t an original idea when it was in development, citing a documentary in which Horizon Zero Dawn art director Jan-Bart van Beek reportedly says there were concerns during planning that the game was too similar to Bandai Namco‘s 2013 game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
“Sony shelved the project, only to revive it later with full awareness that the idea was far from novel,” Tencent claims. “When Horizon Zero Dawn finally launched in 2017, the gaming community noted its striking resemblance to Enslaved and other genre staples.”
Sony’s initial lawsuit claims that Light of Motiram’s use of “a young, red-headed female protagonist and tribal groups fighting for survival among large robotic animals in a post-apocalyptic world” results in a project that has “wilfully infringed” registered Horizon copyrights, as well as the Aloy character trademark.
Light of Motiram is developed by Polaris Quest, a subsidiary of Tencent. The game is described as an open world adventure set in a land “where human civilisation has ceased to exist”. This world is inhabited by mechanical animals known as mechanimals, including a large gorilla, deer and bull.
