Earlier this year, Sony filed a lawsuit against Chinese multinational technology conglomerate and holding company Tencent, alleging that its project Light of Motiram a “slavish clone” – now, Tencent has officially issued its own response.
Open-world survival game Light of Motiram was said by Sony to be a copy of Horizon Zero Dawn, prompting developer and Tencent subsidiary Polaris Quest to scrub any sign of robot mastodons and Aloy lookalikes from its Steam page. The company hadn’t responded to Sony otherwise at the time, however – but it has now, as reported by The Game Post. In its response to the lawsuit, Tencent outlines why it believes Sony has overstepped.
“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 statement. “At bottom, Sony’s effort is not aimed at fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property.” Tencent doesn’t stop there.
“It is an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it Sony’s exclusive domain,” it continues. “In Sony’s telling, Horizon Zero Dawn is ‘like no fictional world created before [or] since.'” According to Tencent, this claim is “startling” as “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 declares that Sony’s lawsuit “tellingly ignores these facts,” and instead “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 Breath of the Wild and Outer Wilds, “Sony seeks an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions.”
Tencent cites examples of Horizon Zero Dawn’s own devs’ comparisons between the Sony game and others before it, like an instance in which art director Jan-Bart van Beek said it was similar in concept to 2013 title Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. “Long before this lawsuit was filed,” explains the company, “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.”
Furthermore, Tencent says Sony’s lawsuit targeted the incorrect entities and is therefore not legally valid. “None of the served defendants develop and market the Light of Motiram video game that Sony alleges infringes its intellectual property in the Horizon franchise,” reads the response from Tencent. Light of Motiram is in development under Polaris Quest, whereas Tencent Holdings Ltd. simply stands as a parent company.
“Sony’s threadbare, conclusory allegations improperly lump these Defendants together with the foreign companies alleged to be responsible for the core conduct at issue,” continues the document. “Sony’s vague allegations against ‘Tencent’ or ‘Defendants’ generally cannot substantiate the claims it brings against Tencent America, Proxima Beta US, or Tencent Holdings specifically.”
There’s also timing. Light of Motiram isn’t set to release until 2027, with Tencent arguing that Sony’s lawsuit is therefore built on hypotheticals of what the game “might” look like or what the sued companies “might” do with it. “The alleged infringements have not occurred and may in fact never occur,” as the company describes in its statement to Sony. There’s no telling just yet what will come of it all, but “Tencent America, Proxima Beta U.S., and Tencent Holdings respectfully request dismissal of the claims alleged against them in the Complaint.”
The response from Tencent was only issued yesterday, whereas Sony’s initial lawsuit arrived in late July this year. It may be some time before another statement comes from either side – but for now, it does look like Light of Motiram is still in the works.