Tencent Responds to Sony Lawsuit That Claims Light of Motiram Rips Off Horizon Series - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 18 September 2025 / 5,921 Views
Sony in July of this year filed a lawsuit in California federal court against Tencent that alleges Tencent has ripped off Sony Interactive Entertainment's Horizon series of video games with Light of Motiram.
The lawsuit claims Light of Motiram is a "slavish clone" that copies several elements from the Horizon series. This includes identical gameplay, story themes, artistic elements, as well as other similarities. The company also states it declined an offer from Tencent last year to collaborate on a new Horizon game.
Tencent has now filed its response to the lawsuit and has filed the motion to dismiss, according to The Game Post.
"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 complaint.
"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."
Tencent said that Sony's claim that the Horizon series was "like no fictional world created before [or] since" as "startling" and "flatly contradicted" by Sony's own developers.
"In Sony’s telling, Horizon Zero Dawn is 'like no fictional world created before [or] since,'" said Tencent. "That claim is 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."
Tencent added, "Sony’s Complaint tellingly ignores these facts. Instead, it 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 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 also alleges Sony already knew the Horizon series wasn't an original idea as a documentary on Horizon Zero Dawn featured art director Jan-Bart Van Beek admitting the premise of the game has been done before with 2013's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
"Long before this lawsuit was filed, 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," reads the complaint from Tencent.
"In a behind-the-scenes documentary, the art director for Horizon Zero Dawn, Jan-Bart Van Beek, explained that the game’s core conceit—an intrepid, red haired woman navigating the ruins of a shattered civilization overrun by robotic beasts—had already been executed by a different video game studio in the 2013 title Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
"Mr. Van Beek warned, 'I don’t think we should do this; it touches too much of these other points,' referring to prominent elements of Enslaved. Sony shelved the project—only to revive it later with full awareness that the idea was far from novel. When Horizon Zero Dawn finally launched in 2017, the gaming community noted its striking resemblance to Enslaved and other genre staples."
Light of Motiram is an open-world game that features colossal machines. It is in development for the PlayStation 5, PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, iOS, and Android.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Man you’re blind or just a Sony hater if you can’t see this a blatant ripoff!!!!
Tencent proposed a new Horizon game to Sony, and Sony declined. Tencent has the right to publish their game under a new IP. Yes, it is quite shameless how similar the final product looks compared to Horizon, but they have every right to enter the market with their own spin on the genre.
Not much different than Palworld borrowing very heavily from Pokémon in its gameplay and presentation, nor Genshin Impact borrowing from Breath of the Wild in mechanics and gameplay loop, nor — matter of fact — when Sony produced the PlayStation (after talks fell through at Nintendo) which borrow very heavily from Nintendo’s SNES (e.g. the layout of the controllers are almost identical except for the grips on the PS1 controller).
Sony aren't tryinng to patent gameplay mechanics here. but protect the artistic aspects of their ip which is what is actually relevant to copyright and trademarks.
Yeah, it's big business taking other people's work and passing it off as your own. It's like there's a name for that, fraud? no, theft? nah, plagarism? too obvious.
Humanity doesn't move forward by just taking existing ideas and just copying it. It does it by innovating, improving and creating new ideas. Maybe Tencent could actually put some effort in and do something unique and different?... for their survival crafting game. Hmm, prehaps not.
It's one big business doing the same thing as another big business and providing it as a choice to us gamers.
There is no reasonable argument to be made that humanity is better off if one video game company is prevented from making a game that is similar to another game. If you have one, go ahead and put it out there. I'd love to hear it.
I just wanted to reply because I feel my other comment could be understood in a way counter to what you wrote. Of course the fake moral outrage attached to this topic is disgusting, and of course the result of long term malicious propaganda (e.g. equating ¨IP violations¨ with ¨theft¨, note this entire ¨field¨ is dominated by lawyers who know exactly why that comparison is false). I think it´s also worth pointing out the disgusting jingoistic aspect here, i.e. the disparagement of any Chinese connection. I think we can all admit that such wasn´t done re: Palworld´s Japaneseness... And in fact Sony was happy to cut deals with Palworld´s developer. I think the developer here has a more problematic legal situation due to approaching Sony with game already in development, but these are legal technicalities between corporate entities who are happy to exploit the rules when it suits them, and abuse them when that is more convenient. That´s all.
Is it not obvious? Setting the precedent that likenesses and creative works can be copied means no creator has a right to their work to ever stand out. Anyone else can just copy it and profit off someone else’s ideas.
For example, it means that a large chain like Amazon, who controls the majority of book distribution, can shut down independent sales, and employ a bunch of AI engineers to steal everyone else’s work, pump it through AI to change names and re-write the words so they’re still almost the same, and sell it on by far the largest book marketplace in the world.
Yeah, this is a clear win for Sony. There are many elements that look to copy Horizon exactly, including the likeness of the main character. This will probably violate copyright law, particularly considering how the work is undoubtedly heavy plagiarism.
Tencent’s rebuttal is a joke. None of the games they cited are anywhere near as close to Horizon as their game is. It only makes them look much worse by pretending these things are accurate. In fact, Tencent’s rebuttal is so much of a joke that the judge might slap the highest possible penalty on them.
Why the hell was Tencent stupid enough to make this game?
Yeaaah, I'm with Tencent on that one, the double standards that people have for this and Nintendo's lawsuit should be studied lol
Same here.
HZD didnt invent anything original.
Open World, Heroine and robots existed long before HZD and they will exist long after it.
Every game today copy something from other game, this Sony lawsuit is just a non sense
They straight up made it as a horizon game and only dropped the branding when Sony refused them. This was even something the community long assumed well before sony evvne confirmed it. this isn't hard.
In this case though ... no. It is the sum of all the parts - the style of the game, the artwork, how the machines look, how the main character looks, how the weapons look, along with the premise of the game. It is about a 99% clone of Horizon Zero Dawn.
Another way of putting my feelings: you can definitely make a game set in the far future where machines based on past animals have taken over and you have to survive with a combination of primal and formally high-tech weapons (i.e. Horizon). You just can't have those machines and main character and weapons and environments all LOOK EXACTLY like another game that did that exact same thing lol
Pocketpair couldn't even figure out how to capture, store and summon their... Pocket Monsters... without copying the PokeBall, until Nintendo butted in and made they change it.
Are you keeping that same energy with Palworld?
Palworld has/is changing elements of the game that Nintendo is suing them over.
China copies and regularly lies about it, that is all you need to know.
I don't believe Tencent's claims hold water simply because they approached Sony with this specifically for the purpose of creating a Horizon game. So clearly everything looks like its a ripoff of Horizon because it was created with the specific intention of being Horizon. As in this game wouldn't even exist if it wasn't intended to be Horizon intially.
Yep, I think that more or less nails that coffin shut. Even without that knowledge, their rebuttal of “look at these other games that have done this before” is clownishly false… None of the games they cited look like a literal clone of Horizon.
It’s like if a company made a sidescrolling platformer of two plumbers in red and green overalls, in levels that looked like the art assets of Mario Bros with slight differences, and called it “Plumber Jumping Adventure” and when they got sued, claimed “Sonic the Hedgehog, Earthworm Jim, and others did this too… Why pick on us? Nintendo themselves copied load runner. That’s all our game is doing! Treading a well beaten path! Why are you picking on us, guy?????!?!?”
If what Sony says is true and Tencent only approached (or rumoured apparently a number of times) Sony for a colab then not long after Sony said no, they show off and announced LoM then it sounds like Tencent were specifically making the game with that intention and didn't expect Sony to say no (for some reason). They then should have started moving back on similarities in design and aesthetics.
They are right about the idea of "time honoured tropes" with post apocalyptic world with robots but I can look at Enslaved, Far Cry or Biomutant and clearly see a distinction between those and Horizon, yet people literally thought the game was Horizon, the aesthetics were just too close.
No idea why Zelda is being mentioned, vastly different games.
-"No idea why Zelda is being mentioned, vastly different games."
Well, the game could be centered around climbing anything you want while dealing with a stamina bar. Outside of that, it's likely just an easy PR tactic. "What do you mean plagiarism? We're just absorbing from an assortment of other titles."
HZD is almost 1 to 1 copy of Enslaved.
The only difference is different type of robots and Bow, everything else is the same.
HZD looks nothing like Enslaved!!!
That’s an utterly ignorant claim. None of what you just said is true.
Agreed... Tencent´s publicity here is really a straw-man because Sony isn´t claiming the over-arching monopoly on genre elements as Tencent alleges, as seen by Sony not going after other games touching on those elements. I can sort of squint my eyes and see how a lawyer could have talked Tencent into beleiving they have a strong case, because the game is not just a rip-off sequel to HZD but has it´s own dynamics even if they just go way too close to HZD. Ultimately, if it wasn´t infringing on HZD and was just an equivalent genre-exploitation product like any other, it wouldn´t really be a big deal to dial back the most dubious resemblances.
I think their previous negotiations with Sony for explicit HZD spin-off really will undermine the case the most. I don´t think there is the time-span to plausibly develop a game from scratch after breaking those off, when the game was already in development (or pre-development, if you wish). All the staff who had worked on the project pre-negotiation with Sony can be depositiond and have their communications subpoena´d, and it would be hard to hide the fact the game was built around being a HZD spin-off. And essentially Tencent and their own staff would be testifying against Tencent´s curent line if previous to negotiations, they all felt there was real HZD IP that the game was being built around, but in the end they just did the game without changing much.
Honestly it just seems like Tencent got obsessed with how Palworld got away with it, and decided they had to do the same thing... Which kind of just ends up ruining their relation with Sony, which could have been based on solid IP collaboration. Not really seeing how it could have been worth it for them.
What don't the Chinese copy?
War
green energy infrastructure and high-speed rail can be added
What isn't copied from China? The article mentions Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, which is straight taken from the chinese 16th century novel Journey to the West. This novel is often adapted outside of China, for instance Dragonball also is based on the novel. Also the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms is basis for the game of the same name by the japanese company Koei. Chinese invented noodles and gunpowder, both of which came over the silk road to europe. The british outright stole tea plants to plant in their colonies, which are to this day the biggest producer of tea. And so on. So yeah, I think the chinese copy especially one thing from us: how to copy.
It's kinda funny how Light of Motiram is emblematic of China across virtually everything. Think of any modern-day innovation, technology or whatnot, and odds are the CCP is making or has made on their own LoM version.
Its a 100% ripoff
I dont get it. People are attacking Nintendo for copyrighting their mechanics to avoid this stuff, but when a blantent rip off of a Sony game, it's pitchforks.
Thats why Japanese companies are copying righting everything to try to stop these things from happening.
Its not a Nintendo or Spny thing. Its a Tencent thing.
Sony is trying to sue the Chinese for stealing, but people hating Nintendo for copying righting their ideas to avoid this situation
Why is Sony (a Japanese company) filing a lawsuit against Tencent (a Chinese company)… in California?
Chinese copyright laws are different and so they'd unlikely not win. Tencent could easily just not release the game in Japan and not suffer to much in sales if done there. Likely doing it in USA because it's their biggest single market so will hold more weight and force them to change the game enough to be different.
I don't recall seeing a more blatant rip off, it's clear to see. Before the name reveal, one would think they are looking at a new Horizon trailer. But of course the opposing lawyer will do everything they can to explain this away, it's their job.
China and Tencent can suck sh*t
Now this is where Sony has the advantage.
That game won’t come to PlayStation and nor will it go to Xbox. It will be pc only and tbh it will struggle as Horizon is there. Why not Xbox you ask? Well I suspect Sony will put this on Xbox as an offer to Microsoft to block this ripoff ever coming to the platform.
Isn't horizon story a rip off of enslaved story lol
For purposes of this discussion, I'll stipulate that the game was built by Tencent with the intention of selling it as a Horizon game. They made it as faithful to the series as possible, because they wanted it to be a part of that series.
With that stipulation in mind, Tencent still did nothing wrong. You might be able to argue that it would be wrong of them to call it Horizon without Sony's blessing. But, they are not doing that. There's nothing wrong with taking a good idea and making use of it. The Horizon games are good. I'm glad that somebody is making a game like them. It's good for all of us. And, if the game is good, it'll push Sony to make the next Horizon even better, lest we all decide to play Tencent's new series instead.
Similarly, if Sony takes some of the new stuff that is introduced in this game and puts it in the next Horizon game, that will also be good.
