Foul play: Sony sues Tencent over brazen plagiarism of the Horizon series

At the end of 2024, Polaris Quest studio, which is owned by the Chinese corporation Tencent, presented Light of Motiram. It is a conditionally free open-world survival simulator, every element of which almost completely repeats the Horizon series by Guerrilla Games, which is the flagship franchise of the PlayStation brand.

The similarity is so blatant that it was obvious: the Chinese are not inspired, but plagiarise other people's intellectual property, and the consequences of such a move did not take long to sink in.

Here's What We Know

Sony has filed a lawsuit in a California federal court alleging copyright infringement of Horizon by Tencent.

PlayStation accuses its Chinese competitor/partner of "brazenly cloning Horizon" and cites detailed examples of its game's near 100% similarity to Light of Motiram.

As in Horizon, in the Chinese game, humanity has been degraded to the level of tribal peoples and is forced to co-exist with huge beast-like robots. The games' similarities are evident in location design, characters, clothing, weapons, gameplay mechanics, and more.

After filing a lawsuit, an interesting nuance was revealed: it turned out that in March 2024, Tencent offered Sony to create a new game based on the Horizon franchise in a more Asian setting, but the Japanese refused and in November followed the announcement of Light of Motiram.

As a result, Sony is demanding an undisclosed amount of monetary compensation and a ban on the release of Light of Motiram in its current form.

Tencent has not commented on the situation.

So far, Light of Motiram is being prepared not only for PC (Steam, Epic Games Store) and mobile devices, but also, as ironic as it sounds, for PlayStation 5.

Source: Reuters