In light of Sony’s lawsuit against Tencent which claims that the latter company’s upcoming title Light of Motiram is a “slavish clone” of the former’s Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, Tencent has now offered its own statement on the matter. As caught by GamesRadar, Tencent’s response to the lawsuit involves the company calling Sony out for its “improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture”.
“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,” said Tencent about the lawsuit. “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,” the statement continues. “In Sony’s telling, Horizon Zero Dawn is ‘like no fictional world created before [or] since.'” Tencent calls this claim “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.”
Further in its statement, Tencent even brings up comparisons made by art director of Horizon Zero Dawn, Jan-Bart Van Beek, drew with 2013 action adventure title Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
“Sony’s complaint tellingly ignores these facts,” said Tencent. “Instead it tries to transform ubiquitous genre ingredients into proprietary assets. By suing over an unreleased project that merely employes 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 then goes on to bring up faults in Sony’s complaints, such as the latter not alleging any facts that would implicate actions by Tencent under a jurisdiction where Sony would operate, as well as Sony’s lack of statement with regards to a claim for which relief could then be granted. “Instead, Sony’s threadbare, conclusory allegations improperly lump [Tencent America, Proxima Beta U.S. and Tencent Holdings] together with the foreign companies alleged to be responsible for the core conduct at issue.” Finally, Tencent also calls out Sony for “speculation regarding potential future conduct related to Light of Motiram’s forthcoming release”.
Sony had announced its lawsuit against Tencent for Light of Motiram back in July, with the allegations of it being a “slavish clone” of the Horizon titles that has the potential to confuse potential buyers because of the similarities between the how the titles look. In response to the lawsuit, Tencent had changed up some of its marketing for Light of Motiram, going as far as changing up the art work for the title that was being shown off on its Steam page. This includes the removal of any mentions of “colossal machines”.
