Riot Games is suing China-based publisher NetEase's five-on-five mobile shooter Hyper Front for VALORANT fakes. Riot Games attorney Dan Nabel is also taking the case to courts in the UK, Germany, Brazil and Singapore. Lawsuits differ slightly in each country depending on the copyright laws involved, but the impetus is the same (As Riot's lawyers claim in their UK filing, Hyper Front "contains a copy of key parts of the Valorant game").
Hyper Front, like Valorant, is a free-to-play first-person shooter where teams of five play against each other in a number of different modes. Riot Games released Valorant on Windows PC in 2020 and is currently working on a mobile version announced in 2021. As of that year, Valorant continues to be successful with an average of more than 14 million players per month.
Hyper Front was released on Android and iOS in 2022. Player data for Hyper Front is not available, but Google Play StoreIt is also listed as having over 1 million downloads and over 48.000 reviews. The game is currently unplayable in the US, where Riot Games is headquartered. Riot reveals a number of similarities between the two games in its case in the UK: characters, maps, weapons, weapon skins and talismans, even going as far as comparing weapon stats. The studio claims in the lawsuit that NetEase tweaked Hyper Front a bit after Riot's initial complaints, as shown in the images below. Still, Riot says copyright infringement goes beyond that.
“All of our creative choices are reflected in NetEase's game,” Riot Games attorney Dan Nabel told Polygon. We don't think changing the color of a character ability or slightly changing the visual appearance changes the fact that this is copyright infringement. It's like the old saying, 'You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig'. " said.
NetEase, on the other hand, hesitated to respond to this statement.
Nabel compared the Hyper Front case to another case involving NetEase's Knives Out and Rules of Survival, which PUBG Corp. said violated PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. This lawsuit, filed in a U.S. court in 2018, was settled in 2019, but the terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
Riot Games is filing with the courts for "significant" fines and forcing NetEase to shut down Hyper Front. Nabel said the company has sued the issue in multiple courts because "copyright is territorial" with different laws in different parts of the world. “We don't want to rely on a particular market to get this issue resolved. NetEase is a global publisher like us. We want them to know that we take this matter very seriously.” said.
Riot Games has certainly proven this by filing a series of lawsuits against companies that have made copies of their games in the past. Earlier this year, Riot sued several companies for impersonating League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics.
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