Sony Sues Tencent Over Horizon Lookalike
(www.gamespot.com)
from simple@piefed.social to games@lemmy.world on 28 Jul 19:16
https://piefed.social/post/1087547
from simple@piefed.social to games@lemmy.world on 28 Jul 19:16
https://piefed.social/post/1087547
Sony Interactive Entertainment has filed a lawsuit against Tencent over its upcoming game Light of Motiram, with Sony saying it is a "slavish clone" of the Horizon series.
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Sony aren't kidding, that trailer literally looks like Horizon down to the small details. It's not even funny how 1-to-1 it is.
It’s actually very funny.
Wadya expect from China?
Seriously, it looks like they took a slightly different build of the game, pasted a new face on Aloy, added a few animals, and literally changed nothing else at all. Like not even scanning effects. Doesn’t the last one even have hanggliding?
That’s not to say it looks bad, it could easily just play like a spin-off, but even the regions look similar.
Tbh, though, I really hate how Horizon scaled the combat difficulty with unending spamming AOE attacks.
It’s not a hang glider exactly but like an energy field parachute thing, but yes slow falling is a mechanic they introduced in the second one
Horizon 1 was excellent, part 2 was too much. Kinda like Jedi survivor, we went from a somewhat small game to one 10x the size. I couldn’t even finish it
I liked pretty much everything about it except that harder combat just meant spamming meteors at you, like Thanos and Iron Man. If they throw another moon at me, Im gonna lose it. It’s such damn lazy design.
It even has the red grass to hide in.
I thought it was a horizon dlc first time i saw it
A Chinese company doing what Chinese companies do best. I fully expect this game to be released and it will take a bite out of Horizons sales numbers.
Press X to doubt
With the focus on PC and Mobile in China, the big console franchises don’t strike me as super popular over there (based on nothing but feelings).
“The word ‘copyright infringement’ doesn’t translate very well into mandarin”
I went to the game’s website to see how they portrayed the game as opposed to taking whatever cherry-picked similarities Sony chose to use as their argument.
Wow. It is fucking identical. Maybe the gameplay is different, but the art is indistinguishable.
The hint of gameplay in trailer looks like a near copy of monster hunter games to me.
Edit - funny though, Monster Hunter x Horizon actually seems like a great combo, but not like this.
Horizon is such wasted potential. 2 games in 8 years, and a LEGO spinoff. Where is Horizon 3? Where is Horizon Warriors? Where is the Horizon RPG?
The world needs to be fleshed out so an RPG would actually be pretty good. The problem is it’s a pretty world but it isn’t really very interesting. The humans who occupy the world are frankly boring and you can only fight so many robot elk before you want to do something else.
A prequel would be interesting, detailing what happened and maybe explaining how things ended up the way they now are.
An endless online humans vs machines prequel, basically Helldivers, would have been great.
They’re not robot dinosaurs, they’re legally distinct robot mammals. /s
Yeah I don’t have the greatest love for Sony but they have a really good point with this.
It’s basically the same game; Robot animals have taken over the world because reasons, Humans survive in small groups and have reverted to some kind of native american inspired spirituality for some bizarre never explained reason, you play as hyper athletic female warrior type who has to fight said robot animal things, your mission is to acquire some long lost secret technology from before the world was taken over by robot animals.
and a nolan north style ghost to boot
If sony has physical proof of this, Tencent is fucked and this game will never be released
Yeah this seems like a smoking gun of intent to reproduce the IP. Hard to claim it was done in ignorance if Sony has documentation on this licensing pitch.
Yeah, I gotta go with Sony on this and holy shit that is horizon zero dawn all the way!
There’s got to be irony somewhere in Sony striking a deal with Palworld, then suing another company for copying the art of their game.
Is the art of Palworld similar to Pokémon?
There are some monster designs that are very similar to Pokemon, but FWIW Pokemon has a lot of simple designs inspired by real animals anyway.
Interestingly, most of the copied ones are the non-animal designs like Goodra with Liligant’s flower
pikachu, bulbasaur was pretty obvious
You can be the judge of that.
Some are the designs are pretty close I will admit, even though I don’t think Nintendo should be able to randomly shut down gamea that are vaguely similar to Pokémon.
That’s why it’s irony, Sony support knockoff, got their game knockedoff and mad about it.
But is Palworld really a knockoff? Some of the designs are similar, but I didn’t get the impression that whole game is a knockoff.
If we used Nintendo’s logic, we would never have any other CRPGs beyond Ultima. I am don’t support such measures.
Yes it is, the design of some of those monster at least.
I’m not here to defend anyone, i just find it funny. If you wanna defend sony or whosthatpalworlddev, you be you.
I would rather have more competition in the market.
No one saying otherwise.
This seems very relevant to the lawsuit.
What did they do, decide to develop a Horizon game in-house, then ask for permission retroactively, and then release it anyway when Sony didn’t agree?
That sounds like exactly what they did
Would not be the first time, although usually developers then go out of their way to make things more legally distinct.
Off the top of my head, the PS1 game Croc was reportedly originally pitched to Nintendo as a 3D platformer starring Yoshi (it was made by some of the team behind StarFox). They obviously reworked it a ton before it released as what it ended up as.
Not as relevant as you would think, and actually somewhat common in the industry; Warcraft (the RTS) was developed ahead of asking for a license for the Warhammer franchise. When that deal fell through, it was rejigged to be its own thing and published.
I think the key here is that it’s completely identical. It’s virtually the same product if you told me it was another game set in the same universe I would have believed you.
When you rejig something you have to change it enough that it’s distinct, I’m not convinced they changed literally anything.
Starcraft is Warhammer 40k. Terrans are space marines. Protoss are Eldar. Zerg are Tyranids. Been happening a long time now
There is also evidence that an out of court settlement happened between those companies. Notably moving away from cerebrates in SC2.
Doom started out as an Aliens game. Though they pivoted away from that to retain more creative freedom.
Yessss pls damage each other
Heh, remember when everyone was playing Breath of the Wild aka Genshin Impact?
imagine spending all that dev time to just get shredded. bruh
Do they have a case? As long as Tencent isn’t actively copying Horizon beyond an aesthetic, are they infringing on anything?
The key is whether or not someone would confuse one franchise for another based on the aesthetics. People were losing their minds over Palworld being a ripoff of Pokemon when it first released.
I could see it going either way. IP law is a mess.
There is the additional case that apparently $0.10 wants to licence the IP. (Autocorrect has just changed the name to a price, and I’m inclined to leave it because it’s funny)
It sounds like what happened here is they developed the game and then approached Sony for the licence assuming they were going to get it (which is a bizarre thing to do because Sony were never going to give them a licence, anyone who knows anything about how Sony operate knows that)
Not sure I care about who will win that one, but if Sony can prove
tenc$0.10 actually came to them to get a Horizon licence, only to release “can’t believe it’s not Horizon” shortly after not getting it, that would be quite the smoking gun.It’s basically a proof that looking as similar as possible was their intention all along.
They asked for the IP to horizon when making it and made a “different” game when told no
Same:
Different:
I low key would want to play through this in an any% kind of way. Just to see if it’s fun. But the battle sequences did not sell this well, I have to say.
Good luck to all.
A game does not sell just because of art or the IP. So I like that there is competition. Would suck for Sony if the copy had better code quality, a better story, more content than their games at half the price.
I think it’s proven fact that things often sell off of the art and IP, sometimes for those alone. If that wasn’t the case they wouldn’t fight so hard to protect it.
Oh they obviously make more money out of those IP than they invest. And some IP’s are rather good. However, suing competition also means the market is so small, it is worth fighting them on the legal path, which actually proves my point.
Counterpoint: the janky-ass Pokémon games that suck and still print money.
Same for Assassin’s Creed, Black Ops, etc. It does not mean they get bought because they are good. It means there is nothing else to play. For Pokémon there is actually a good example how to create this healthy competition - it is called Palworld.
It does look like a clone, but fuck IP law. Sony winning this will only hurt games because any publisher with a genre creating / defining game could gatekeep any competitors from coming in *cough Nintendo.
The original horizon came out 8 years ago, that’s plenty of time for them to cash in on the monopoly they get for all the creativity that went into creating the genre / style.
Its not like they’re marketing it with a similar name or main character or any other identifier that could trick someone into buying it instead either.
Eh this lawsuit actually sounds like it has grounds… Tencent asked to make a spinoff, got rejected, then made it anyway.
You already lost bud pal world lost the case to use checks notes creatures that can glide?
Uhh the game looks awesome from what the trailer shows. I want to play it, and I’m already hyped for it. The combat also looks better than what it was in Horizon 1.
I honestly don’t care if they just copy games like this. I’m too tired of awesome concepts & IPs being completely misused & wasted by game publishers.
I’m hoping Tencent wins this one, because I wanna play the game. If they do win, I bet “Monster Hunter x Horizon + conventionally attractive characters” would sell like hotcakes.
Horizon: Temu Dawn
Horizon: Forbidden Wish.com
Horizon: Aliexpress West
I saw the trailer for that game and laughed my ass off, i legit thought it was a horizon DLC and when I realized it wasn’t, I couldn’t get past the obvious fact that it’s a straight ripoff that barely changed anything
if they dont’t market it as something related to horizon then what’s the issue? we have millions of clones of various games with different graphics, and so what?