Riot Games has sued its publisher NetEase for allegedly copying their popular multiplayer online battle arena game, League of Legends.
Lawsuit
It has filed lawsuits against its competitors in the UK, Germany, Brazil, Singapore, and elsewhere.
The lawsuits differ somewhat from one jurisdiction to another, but the gist of the argument is the same — that Riot Games’ game, HyperFront, is a copy of substantial portions of Valorant, as Riot Games claims in its lawsuit against HyperFront.
HyperFront is a free-to-play first-person shooting game where teams of five players compete in various game types.
Riot Games released its first game called “Valorant” in 2020 for Windows PC. It’ll be available in 2021. Since then, Valorant has been averaging more than 14 million players each month.
Hyper Front
HyperFront was released in 2022 on both Android and iOS. However, player data for HyperFront isn’t available yet. It has been downloaded more than one million times and has received more than 48,000 user ratings. It’s not available in the United States, where Riot Games is headquartered, at least right now.
Riot lays out a series of similarities between League of Legends and Fortnite in its U.K., court filing. Characters, map designs, weapons, weapon skins, and charms, even compare weapon statistics.
The studio claims in its lawsuit against NetEase that NetEase modified HyperFront slightly after Riot Games’ first complaints. However, Riot argues that NetEase went further than modifying HyperFront.
“All of our creative choices are mirrored in NetEase’s game,” Nabel told Polygon. “We don’t think that changing the color of a character ability or slightly modifying the visual appearance changes the fact that it’s copyright infringement. It’s like that old saying, ‘You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.’”
NetEase has not responded to Polygon’s request for comment.
In January 2020, NetEase sued Tencent Games for copyright infringement over two games, including PUBG Mobile.
The suit claimed that PUBG Mobile infringed upon NetEase’s intellectual property rights by copying features from NetEase’ ‘s own mobile game, Knives Out.
Riot Games is suing NetEase for copyright infringement because they believe NetEase has been using their intellectual property without permission. They’re asking for substantial damages.
Riot Games has definitely proven that in recent years, as it’ll file a lot of suits against copycats of its games. Earlier last year, Riot sued over an Overwatch ripoff and a TFT knockoff. In 2018, Riot, via parent company Tencent Holdings won a $2.8 million lawsuit over another League of Legends lookalike.
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Victor is the Editor in Chief at Techtyche. He tests the performance and quality of new VR boxes, headsets, pedals, etc. He got promoted to the Senior Game Tester position in 2021. His past experience makes him very qualified to review gadgets, speakers, VR, games, Xbox, laptops, and more.
Feel free to check out his posts.
Victor is the Editor in Chief at Techtyche. He tests the performance and quality of new VR boxes, headsets, pedals, etc. He got promoted to the Senior Game Tester position in 2021. His past experience makes him very qualified to review gadgets, speakers, VR, games, Xbox, laptops, and more.
Feel free to check out his posts.
