Sony Is Suing Tencent Over Shameless Horizon Knock-off Game (ign.com) 45
Sony has filed a lawsuit in California court against Tencent, alleging the Chinese company's upcoming game Light of Motiram constitutes a "slavish clone" of Sony's Horizon series.
The complaint details extensive similarities between the games, from post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur settings to red-haired female protagonists. Tencent had approached Sony for licensing deals in 2024, which Sony rejected twice.
The complaint details extensive similarities between the games, from post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur settings to red-haired female protagonists. Tencent had approached Sony for licensing deals in 2024, which Sony rejected twice.
I usually don't support the big guys, but damn... (Score:5, Informative)
There is zero doubt in my mind this is IP theft after looking at the demo videos. I mean they literally just copied the game.
Re: I usually don't support the big guys, but damn (Score:2)
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I'm sure the guys behind PalWorld would pay you handsomely for telling Nintendo that.
George Lucas loses Star Wars helmet copyright (Score:3)
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-12... [bbc.com]
Lucas loses Star Wars copyright case at Supreme Court - BBC - 27 July 2011
- "A prop designer who made the original Stormtrooper helmets for Star Wars has won his copyright battle with director George Lucas over his right to sell replicas. "
- "the father-of-two, who has been selling his plastic composite helmets and body armour from his studio in Twickenham, south west London, for eight years now."
- "Lucasfilm sued for $20m in 2004, arguing Mr Ainsworth did not hold the inte
AI tools for 3d model generation (Score:2)
Google:
- ai to generate 3d model from a video open source
- ai to generate 3d model from a "photo" open source
- generate 3d house model from photos
And there are multiple commercial services for this
- Wikipedia photogrammetry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
- Remote sensing too
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Re:I usually don't support the big guys, but damn. (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no art copied. You can't copyright style or mechanics or even plot of an RPG.
HOWEVER, where there is money, there is opportunity to ignore precedent in Trump's America, amirite?
Copyright law is a bit more nuanced than that. You can’t copyright general ideas like game mechanics, but you can copyright how those ideas are expressed—like specific characters, art, dialogue, or unique plot sequences. You can't make an a new Star Trek series called Space Trek and just rename everything. Captain Kark and Mr. Sprocket fly the USS Enterwarp on a 5 year mission. You would get sued, and you'd lose.
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unless mr sprocket looked like an actual sprocket, and everyone else had punny names and appearances to match. then you might just get away with it.
Re:I usually don't support the big guys, but damn. (Score:4, Informative)
That's not how copyright works. Software like video games are subject to copyright. Under copyright cases, there is rarely ever any evidence of actual direct copying; if there was it would be more like a criminal case; a subject of criminal theft of code for example. Instead, copyright is adjudicated on the concept of Substantial Similarity [wikipedia.org]. These things prove indirect copying, and use a few concepts such as how unique are similar sections or if the original work contains idiosyncratic elements that the infringing work repeats. There's nothing wrong with having a red-haired female protagonist, or robot animals in a game, or a post-apocalyptic "resurgence of humanity" elements in your game. However when you put those all together in a 3rd person action environment and give her a bow to fight said robot animals with, it's pretty much Horizon.
But fundamentally the simple litmus test is how does the market perceive it. Copyright at it's heart is about selling products, and if potential customers see it as a copy and could be confused to think it comes from the original work's creator, then it meets the standard. Given the sheer number of comments and articles about this all of which overwhelmingly see the substantial similarities, then it's pretty clear that the market would respond in a way that would involve missed revenue here.
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They have little leg to stand on. One could argue there's only so many ways to make a futuristic world with machines and people coexisting. But then one has to wonder why they ever went as far as copying the glow of the impact on certain machine parts that the player hits with their weapon. They outright copied incredibly minor details.
Re: I usually don't support the big guys, but damn (Score:3)
In this case the two companies met about making this game together, then decided not to, then one of those companies that wasn't originally already developing it made a copy of the game already under development. You might not know this from the summary, but that's why reading the fine article and also other materials about the same story is valuable.
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Trump's America
This isn't a political debate. No one gives a shit who is in power and the laws governing copyright haven't changed since Trump took power since he's too busy kicking out non-white people.
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Not exactly. Supposedly the game play is totally different.
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But did they *literally* copy? Because copyright is about literal copies, not about ideas.
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There is zero doubt in my mind this is IP theft after looking at the demo videos. I mean they literally just copied the game.
But damn, it looks nice! If the actual game looks anything like the trailer video, and does so with "recommended" machine specs of a 3060 and 30GB of storage, well, I hope it sees daylight as a torrent if not as a Steam release.
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You could just... play the originals.
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You could just... play the originals.
I do. Among the few games I've paid for and felt like I got my money's worth. And they look very nice and run well with a 3070. But I gotta say, the creature design and lighting effects in the shameless knockoff look pretty.
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Sony is not a big guy any more.
I mean ordinarily I would be on Tencent's side (Score:2)
With the way copyright law works in America I do think Sony will lose here. Never mind the fact that Sony's kind of copied zoids so it's going to be a tough thing to pull off.
But I mean this crap was decided years ago when Capcom sued Data East. Which hilariously the deposition video has shown up on YouTube and it's funny as hell to see a mid 90s lawyer try to talk about the differences between fighting games.
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This case might actually be interesting to
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You wouldn't call a white guy from China that word.
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There isn't anything racial about it no.
"Chinese" is a nationality, not a race.
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I'd call them Asian.
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Chinese is both a "race" (really, one of several- but that does not change the fact) and a nationality.
This smells like the kind of dumb bullshit a racist has convinced themselves of.
Let us look at the definition. This shouldn't be necessary, because people aren't supposed to be as fucking stupid as you're pretending to be right now, but here we go:
Chinese (n):
a native or inhabitant of China, or a person of Chinese descent.
Do you think maybe they're referring to descent from....
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The "angle" here is what appears on the U.S Census Bureau for choices.
https://www.census.gov/topics/... [census.gov]
Asian – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.
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I've filled out 2 census forms in my lifetime.
Chinese is indeed listed as a race on the 2010 and 2020 forms.
Race, ultimately, is a social construct.
There can be as few as 3, or as many as hundreds depending on the time frame, and the people asked.
What's important, is that the racial slur for Chinese people is, in fact, racial. It in no way is a slur against "someone from China".
As I said, no white person born in China has ever been called that word.
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Moved out when I was 18 and never looked back.
I did work for the Census Bureau for a while though.
At any rate, if I wanted to insult someone that looked Chinese, and I wanted to be racial about it for some reason, I'd probably just say something like, "You Chinese Motherfucker!"
It honestly would never occur to me to call someone a "chink". I don't how that's supposed to be insulting and it's not a term I have heard in like, FOREVER. It does remind me of a joke I probably last heard when I was 9-10 or so. I
They had One Job! (Score:4, Interesting)
Would it have been so hard to make robot dragons instead of dinos, or chicks with green or purple hair to create plausible deniability?
There are crooks, and there are stupid crooks. This sounds like the second. There are plenty of ways to clone the general concepts without cloning the details.
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Maybe instead you play a straight red haired sexy super strong girl who in between two robot dinosaurs kills finds time to help some regular primitive bone-in-the-nose, feathers-and-tattoos poor vill
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village people [...] and you never ever have to be even remotely aware of anyone's sexual orientation ?
I'm not so sure. :D
The game itself isn't really like Horizon (Score:4, Interesting)
At least in America this is settled case law (Score:2)
You can't copyright or trademark a style. And you can't copyright and trademark a game genre.
If tencent was a smaller company then they could probably just be bullied but they were almost certainly expecting the lawsuit and will be able to get it shut down based on existing case law.
Then again the courts are pretty insane. I mean if you walk into a courtroom these days you practically flip
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You can't copyright or trademark a style. And you can't copyright and trademark a game genre.
True, but you can copyright art, music, etc. Certain elements that are common to the genre may not be copyrightable, if they are a common form in the genre; but unique items are.
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Data East!!!! Wow!!!
That's not a name I've heard since Karate Champ was a thing!
Thanks for the memories!
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It doesn't help that we put some really crappy judges on the bench for extremely dubious reasons.
The judges on the Supreme Court all went to Harvard or Yale and/or clerked for a Supreme Court judge who did. Judges are political appointees. Crappy legal decisions don't have much to do with the judge's legal ability, just their crappy politics. Being brilliant lawyers just makes it easier for them to explain why the law requires their chosen outcome. Or to twist the law to achieve the same purpose. I suspect the outcome here will be to enhance the value of corporate intellectual property. Tennant loses.
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IANAL.
I assume Sony is pinning their case on the "likelihood of confusion" issue. You can read more about that here: https://www.upcounsel.com/like... [upcounsel.com]
The fact that they specifically call out game journalists reporting that the similarities are so dramatic Sony would likely sue as well as marketing similarities in their court filings both point to this angle.
I can see the right court siding with Sony, but at the same time, there's this: https://www.americanbar.org/gr... [americanbar.org]
There's also a decent chance that Sony
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A few seconds into the trailer it's clear this game is nothing like the Horizon series, except for the general art style and setting being almost a direct copy.
Is it? I didn't get that feeling at all. In fact the few seconds into the trailer showed nothing about what the gameplay is about except for all the elements directly copied from Horizon. Even down to how the player gets a visual indicator of a hit with components glowing on the bad guy, even in the same colour.
Yeah there's demonstration of crafting in the trailer, but your post makes me wonder if you played Horizon at all. Crafting is a core component of that as well. Quite frankly having seen the trailer
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I played about halfway through the first Horizon game, so I'm no expert, but I got the gist. I do, however, play a *lot* of survival crafting games and the trailer had all the hallmarks. Note I'm talking about the gameplay trailer that came out 3 months ago - not the earlier announcement one that was mostly cinematics (which I’d never seen).
You see the player chopping down a tree, making fairly large bases, building a ladder as you climb it, using a pickaxe tool to build a pillar of stone with a cobbl
BLOND HAIR AND WINGS (Score:1)
then it's about robot dragons not robot dinosaurs.... and hair/race/sex swap the main character...