Ever since Light of Motiram was unveiled in November 2024, it was immediately obvious to everyone (us included) that it looked very, very similar to Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West, from the animal-like machines down to the red-haired protagonist dressed in tribal gear.
In July 2025, Guerrilla Games' owner Sony Interactive Entertainment sued Tencent (the parent company of Light of Motiram developer Polaris Quest) in the state of California, alleging copyright and trademark infringement and adding that Tencent reps had reached out to Sony in 2024 about the possibility of making a mobile Horizon game. Sony assumes that when talks failed, Tencent went ahead and made its own Horizon-inspired title anyway.
Yesterday, Tencent officially fought back with a motion to dismiss on a 'myriad of flaws', including but not limited to:
- Lack of actual jurisdiction over Tencent Holdings, which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in China and merely the parent company of the actual entities developing the game, which the motion says haven't been served yet in the case: 'Sony’s threadbare, conclusory allegations improperly lump these Defendants together with the foreign companies alleged to be responsible for the core conduct at issue. Sony’s vague allegations against ‘Tencent’ or ‘Defendants’ generally cannot substantiate the claims it brings against Tencent America, Proxima Beta U.S., or Tencent Holdings specifically.
- For the time being, the claims amount to speculation as the game's release date (which has conveniently been set just now to Q4 2027 on Steam) is far away and the alleged infringements haven't happened and may never happen.
- Lastly and perhaps more interestingly, the motion to dismiss labels Sony's lawsuit as a clumsy attempt to secure a corner of popular culture for themselves.
In this regard, Tencent's motion goes as far as including actual quotes from Guerrilla Games, specifically from Lead Artist Jan-Bart van Beek, who mentioned in a NoClip documentary that when pitching Horizon, the developers initially shelved it because of its similarities to Ninja Theory's 2013 game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West:
Enslaved basically featured a post-apocalyptic world, a female protagonist, machines that were slumbering that would be awakened. So I myself went to Hermen and I said like, I don't think we should do this, it touches too much of these other points. And Hermen, he sort of was very reluctant. He said like okay, well, I think it's a bad idea to do this, but you know, we'll can it for now and maybe we'll look at it later.
That's exactly what happened. For some time, Guerrilla worked on another pitch, a shooter set in an alternate history steampunk setting loosely in the vein of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Unbeknownst to the Dutch studio, though, Ready at Dawn was already doing something not too far from that with The Order: 1886. Eventually, Studio Technical Director Michiel van der Leeuw asked Studio Head Hermen Hulst to reconsider the Horizon pitch, and Guerrilla switched back to that.
Tencent's point is clear-cut:
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.
However, it should be noted that Tencent, or at least its developers who are actually making the game, have made several changes in the description and the screenshots of Light of Motiram to distance themselves from the Horizon IP. The red-headed protagonist who looked a lot like Aloy is nowhere to be seen, for instance.
To be fair, the actual game is probably going to play quite a bit differently. It will have survival mechanics such as base building. It also supports online cooperative play, which is missing from the Horizon games (although Guerrilla is now working on Horizon Online).
As to the lawsuit, we'll see how Sony responds to this motion to dismiss. We'll report any noteworthy updates on the lawsuit, so stay tuned.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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