PlayStation sues Tencent over Horizon ‘clone' Light Of Motiram
Last November, Chinese conglomerate Tencent announced a brand new survival game for PC called Light Of Motiram; one that you can play with friends as you explore a post-apocalyptic world populated by animal-like machines.
The game's announcement quickly went viral, not because it looked any good, but because it looked an awful lot like Sony's Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel. Even the woman depicted in the key art shared many similarities with Horizon protagonist Aloy.
At the time, some wondered if Sony would take umbrage with Light Of Motiram. Turns out the answer to that is yes, as the company has formally filed a lawsuit against Tencent, accusing it of copyright and trademark infringement.
According to Reuters the lawsuit explicitly describes Light Of Motiram as a 'slavish clone of Sony Interactive Entertainment's immensely popular, award-winning Horizon series of video games.'
Sony even cites the initial public response and comments from gaming news websites as evidence of Tencent copying Horizon developer Guerrilla Games' homework.
Interestingly, Sony also mentions that representatives of Tencent and one of its internal developers, Aurora Studios, previously approached the company to pitch a new Horizon game – one that would retain the established open world setting but feature 'Eastern aesthetics', survival mechanics, and multiplayer options (so presumably it would've been set in Asia, rather than the US).
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They went so far as to share a photo of Aurora Studios' team members playing one of the Horizon games at work alongside screenshots of their PlayStation trophy lists to demonstrate how they were 'diehard fans' of the series.
Sony rejected the pitch and is convinced that Tencent has repurposed the idea as Light Of Motiram, except they ditched the planned Eastern aesthetic and instead copied Horizon wholesale.
'The Light Of Motiram Promotional Material reflects that even though Sony Interactive Entertainment rejected Tencent's pitch to create a licensed Horizon Franchise game, Tencent continued to produce a game that makes unauthorized use of Sony Interactive Entertainment's rights in the Horizon Franchise intellectual property,' reads the lawsuit.
'In doing so, Tencent misappropriates many of the most distinctive and recognisable protected elements of the Horizon Franchise, including the franchise's overall tone and feel, setting, narrative, characters, and visual expression, leading to confusion as to source, affiliation, and sponsorship of the Light Of Motiram game.'
Elsewhere, Sony also gives away that the Horizons series has sold a collective 38 million units in total. According to the PlayStation Blog, 32.7 million units had been sold as of April 2023, meaning roughly six million more have been sold since then.
As a reminder, the only Horizon games to have come out in that time were a PlayStation 5 remaster of the first game and the multiplatform Lego Horizon Adventures spin-off.
You can read the whole lawsuit in full for yourself, but ultimately Sony is seeking to block Light Of Motiram from ever been released, plus $150,000 'for each separate work in the Horizon Franchise infringed' in damages and for Tencent to hand over any and all marketing materials so Sony can destroy them.
At the time of writing, Tencent has yet to issue any sort of response, so it's unclear if it will comply or if it feels it can win the court case. More Trending
This situation is reminiscent of the still ongoing Nintendo/Palworld legal battle. As a reminder, Palworld quickly gained infamy for its obvious similarities to Pokémon, to the point where some suspected developer Pocketpair of using AI to copy multiple pokémon designs for its catchable cartoon animals.
Nintendo's lawsuit, however, is based on Pocketpair allegedly infringing on Nintendo's patents for certain game mechanics. Since then, Palworld has had some of its mechanics changed. For instance, Pals are no longer summoned by throwing the equivalent of a pokéball, they just appear next to you.
All that said, a report by IP consultant Florian Mueller for GamesFray earlier this month argues that Nintendo isn't guaranteed a clean win. In fact, the company has had one of its patents modified which Mueller believes is a Hail Mary to try and obfuscate the issue.
The Light Of Motiram situation is different, though, since Sony isn't accusing Tencent of copying Horizon's mechanics but the entire concept and aesthetic, thus potentially confusing people into thinking it's an official Horizon game.
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MORE: Horizon Forbidden West review – robosaurs wrecks
MORE: Horizon Call Of The Mountain review – the summit of PSVR2 achievements
MORE: Ubisoft lands itself a Tencent bail out worth £1,000,000,000
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Metro
an hour ago
- Metro
Games Inbox: What year will PS6 be released?
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Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Also, I don't think there's any question that the launch line-up isn't as good as the first Switch. Not so much because of Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza but what's coming up next, which is… a big bag of nothing. I know Zelda: Breath Of The Wild was a special case but that wasn't all they had that year. They also had Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2, ARMS, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, Super Mario Odyssey, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. That is a hell of a line-up, and I really don't think Metroid Prime 4 and a handful of lame spin-offs are going to match up. As the feature said, Nintendo had forever to get ready for this and it feels like they were caught napping. Taylor Moon Easy target To be honest, I'd be surprised if GTA 6 didn't have age verification of some sort, even if this stupid new UK law ends. 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Boomo More Trending Email your comments to: gamecentral@ The small print New Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers' letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content. You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader's Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot. You can also leave your comments below and don't forget to follow us on Twitter. MORE: Games Inbox: What is the next Assassin's Creed game? MORE: Games Inbox: What is the hardest game on PS5? MORE: Games Inbox: What is the easiest Soulsborne game?
The Guardian
13 hours ago
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Caleb Azumah Nelson: ‘Virginia Woolf's London is the London I know'
It's always a surprise when ecstasy arrives. Recently, I've found myself waking early, with dawn on the horizon. I think it might be beautiful to catch the sunrise, and in those quiet moments, I am reminded of the bustle of the city, or a lover's hand in mine, or the words that I couldn't quite say, and, looking back towards the sky, find the sun already risen. I rue that I've missed it; I'm surprised it arrived so quickly. But for a moment, the light shines bright; and briefly, the parts of myself I don't always get to are illuminated. In these moments, I'm reminded of our aliveness. Much of my writing practice is concerned with closing the gap between emotion and expression. The sense of loss in this chasm is inevitable; it's impossible to translate the excitement of seeing a loved one across the room, or the bodily jolt that arrives when you pass a friend on the street and realise you have become strangers. 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The London of Mrs Dalloway, the London I know, is filled with parents and children, lovers and enemies, strangers and familiar faces; filled with love and envy, ambition and grief; filled with an immense beauty, a beauty she, I, might witness 'in people's eyes'. And if we look closely, as strangers and lovers pass us, we might see this beauty as further evidence of our aliveness. And, if you'll allow me, I'd like to speak briefly on love. When I mention the ecstatic or this notion of aliveness, I'm speaking to the moments that are at the height and depths of the human experience. Love encompasses all of these categories. Early on in the novel, Woolf broaches Clarissa's relationship with Sally Seton: 'had not that, after all, been love?' It makes me wonder, is love a question, or does it make us question? Does it make us ask 'who is that?' when confronted with our pull towards another? Does it make us reframe this pull as something that cannot be resisted, as if desire is something to be resisted, as if it is weakness and not virtue? There are no answers, only more questions. But I'd like to point to ecstasy, to one person's lips meeting with another: 'the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling'. Is this not how it feels to be closest to oneself? To feel the most alive? There are no answers, only more questions. But I think, this is what love does. It expands our lives and the ways we express ourselves by making space for our truest, deepest desires, even if we're only glimpsing these needs for a moment. It questions how we came to be, and what we need to go on; it finds us in the space between who we have been and who we are trying to become. And right there, in the midst of it all, love holds up a mirror to see ourselves, our full selves. Grief, I think, is both love's opposite and companion. The grief of a life you might have lived. The grief of a person you might have been. And grief arrives not as loss but its inarticulacies. Clarissa is able to say what happened to her sister, Sylvia, felled by a tree, but she struggles to say how it made her feel. She's able to understand that if she had married Peter, 'this gaiety would have been mine all day!' but she struggles with the emotional heft of this possibility. Some people never find the language to express their grief, or else it tumbles down the chasm between emotion and expression; but we try. 'It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels', but we try. Sometimes, the moonlight briefly vanishes as night does; the sun doesn't blaze but a new dawn breaks; and with that first light, that early sunshine before any clouds appear, the grief eases. And, doused in sunlight, once more, we are reminded, we are alive. Extracted from a talk commissioned by Charleston festival 2025.
Metro
2 days ago
- Metro
Why is Sony trying to kill the concept of the video game console?
A reader worries that Sony's plans to make more of their games multiformat will destroy the entire concept of consoles, as they follow the same path as Xbox. At this point I think it's clear that Xbox is dead. They're the biggest publishers in the West but at such a terrible cost it's almost poetic. No one's buying their hardware and no one is ever likely to again. All the famous Xbox exclusive franchises are not only about to be not exclusive but they're just one more disaster away from being dead franchises. Xbox basically doesn't exist anymore, the way it used to be. All it is, is the combination of Activision Blizzard and Bethesda. Everything else is an insignificant extra, that will probably end up being shut down in short order. It's a classic example of being careful what you wish for but disturbing because, like all rich bullies, Microsoft is now pretending that, actually, they meant to do that and rather than feel bad about turning the industry on its head they're just going to carry on and make things worse. And I'm afraid that Sony is now doing the same thing. Given Microsoft is many times their size, Sony should never have had a chance against them, if they were run by competent people. Call me naïve, but if I were Sony and I saw my long-time rival on the ropes I'd give them the old one-two and finish them off for good. As we've seen though they've done the opposite. It almost seems like they're trying to copy Microsoft, except without the infinite funds and not owning two of the biggest publishers in the world. Suddenly, Sony doesn't care for exclusives and they're embracing multiformat releases, even though that makes absolutely no sense for their business. Sure, they will make more money in the short term, but in the long term… there will be no long term if they destroy the whole concept of a video game console. If you want to play Xbox games now you've got two choices: buy a dying console that Xbox aren't even bothering to sell in some countries now or play them on PC or streaming. Microsoft make money out of this, of course, but they have no control over those formats and so they become just like any other publisher, like EA or Ubisoft. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. There are two basic reasons to buy a console: the lack of fuss and bother (and generally lower price) compared to a PC and the exclusive games. I have long said that Sony releasing their exclusives on PC is a mistake because while you get some short term cash from it you're eating away at the reason anyone would buy a console in the first place. But now we hear that the August release of Helldivers 2 on Xbox Series X/S is not going to be a one-off, that Sony wants to release more games on Xbox and Nintendo Switch. Anything to make the smallest amount of extra money now, even if it means destroying their future forever. Is Sony short of cash or something? Are their financials so bad they have to do the corporate equivalent of going to the pawn shop to make it to the end of the week? Not as far as I know, but that's what they're doing anyway. There seems no point me even complaining at this point, as not only are they obviously not going to listen to me or any other fan but it seems to late. Sony had two choices when Microsoft messed up: go all out to show how good the PlayStation 5 and its line-up of exclusives is or… just sort of roll up and die for no reason. And yes, I know the PlayStation 5 is still selling well but that's because it's the only game in town at the moment, now the Xbox Series X/S has gone to an early grave. But every year the PC becomes more and more popular and that's only going to accelerate as one of the main reasons to buy a console is removed. It's not the end of gaming or anything – third party games will be unaffected – but the sort of exclusive games that Sony used to make are going to become rarer and rarer. They already are but when they don't need them to show off their console, and act like a killer app, they'll just keep reducing the budgets and the number of them they make until they don't bother at all. More Trending In the end, Sony will become a third party publisher too and even more choice and variety will be removed from the games industry. By reader Dunbar The reader's features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro. You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@ or use our Submit Stuff page and you won't need to send an email. MORE: The Nintendo Switch 2 is the closest thing to a modern day Commodore Amiga – Reader's Feature MORE: Star Wars Outlaws is Ubisoft's best game and you should get it now it's cheap - Reader's Feature MORE: It is madness that Konami still hasn't made a new Castlevania - Reader's Feature
