Sony Interactive Entertainment is suing Tencent over the latter’s unreleased Light of Motiram game, which Sony says is a copy of its own Horizon series — something lots of other folks have been saying too, since the game was announced last year. In November, Tencent even claimed the game would be released on Sony’s PlayStation 5 console.
In the lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the Northern District of California court and first reported by Reuters, Sony says it’s filing the lawsuit to “prevent the imminent release of Light of Motiram,” a game it called a “slavish clone” of Sony’s Horizon games. Sony says that nearly all parts of the game are copied from either Horizon Zero Dawn or Horizon Forbidden West. As the lawsuit tells it, Tencent began work on Light of Motiram in 2023 before approaching Sony with a pitch in 2024 that Tencent should develop a Horizon game. “Sony rejected the idea and considered the matter closed,” lawyers wrote in the complaint, which you can read in full here.
“Apparently, Tencent was undeterred by SIE’s refusal to license its Horizon intellectual property,” lawyers wrote. “Tencent continued secretly developing Light of Motiram, evening announcing a forthcoming game.”
The details of Horizon’s world seem everywhere in the marketing material that’s been made public so far — the character bears a strong resemblance to Aloy, from the character’s design and clothing; the world is near identical, blending lush forest environments with mechanical creatures and technology; and even the game’s title text uses similar detailing. Sony’s lawyers spend several pages of the 48-page complaint outlining the ways in which Light of Motiram is a copy of Horizon, including pulling headlines from news outlets and comments from forums and social media.
Sony claims it approached Tencent again this year to “informally resolve its concern that Light of Motiram violated its intellectual property rights,” per the complaint. That’s when Tencent again tried to license the Horizon IP, and Sony apparently rejected the ask a second time. That’s why Sony filed the lawsuit, it says in the complaint. To put it bluntly, Sony also says — later in the lawsuit — that Light of Motiram “is the result of the development project that Tencent previously pitched.”
The suit includes parts of the pitch deck Tencent approached Sony with. In that meeting, lawyers wrote that Tencent’s Aurora Studios development team said its members were “die-hard fans” of the franchise and included screenshots to prove it — the pitch deck has a slide that shows all the trophies the team has earned playing Horizon.
The pitch deck posited a version of a “games-as-a-service” expansion of the Horizon series that brings in Eastern aesthetics – the pitch deck included a slide with an image of Aloy on the Great Wall of China – and survival game elements like crafting and pets. Tencent didn’t share that they already had Light of Motiram in development, Sony’s lawyers say. Shortly after, in 2024, Tencent put up its Steam page for Light of Motiram and described it like this:
“In a world overrun by colossal machines, explore the vast open world, build your base of operations, advance technology, train Mechanimals, and take on formidable bosses. Starting from the primitive age, forge a new path of development. Defy the machination, survive with mechanimals.”
Sony says in the suit that if you swap out the words “Motiram” in the description of the game on its Steam page and put in “Old Ones,” (the lost civilization in Horizon) that the description may as well have been one for Horizon. There’s a lot of images in the complaint to back up the claims of Light of Motiram being a copy — again, of the technology being overtaken by overgrowth, hulking machines that resemble animals, and even the red grass that Aloy blends in with to hide, because of her red hair. (The grass in Light of Motiram doesn’t need to be red, Sony says, because the character in one screenshot shown in the lawsuit doesn’t have red hair. But the game’s character does indeed have red hair.)
Via Sony Interactive Entertainment’s complaint
Another piece that Sony pulls out as an example is the Horizon games’ “focus” device, a mysterious piece of tech that Aloy wears in her ear. It’s used to scan the environment for different points of interest, but a big piece of the story, too. The piece of tech is called Angelos in Light of Motiram.
Sony says in the complaint that Tencent will release a “beta version” of the game for American players “imminently,” before the full release “soon thereafter.” The lawsuit doesn’t mention the potential for a PlayStation 5 release, and the game doesn’t have a PlayStation 5 game page. Neither Sony nor Tencent have responded to Aftermath’s request for comment.
Sony is asking the court for injunctions that would prevent the release of Light of Motiram and for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement, among other penalties.
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