Tencent is fighting back after being sued by Sony for allegedly cloning the PlayStation maker’s popular Horizon series.
The Chinese conglomerate has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, in which Sony described Light of Motiram—an upcoming survival title developed by Tencent subsidiary Polaris Quest—as a “blatant” and “unlawful” copy of Horizon.
As a result, Sony claims Tencent has committed copyright and trademark infringement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tencent disagrees.
In a motion to dismiss filed in the United States District Court Northern District of California on September 17, 2025 (via Court Listener), Tencent said Sony’s lawsuit contains “undifferentiated, vague allegations” and claimed the Japanese firm has failed to “identify with specificity the trademark that allegedly was infringed.”
In addition, Tencent said Sony’s lawsuit is “based almost entirely on speculation regarding future conduct.” As such, Tencent claimed Sony has failed to allege facts that would justify exercising personal jurisdiction over Tencent Holdings, which is a foreign company incorporated in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in China. It suggested that alone is sufficient grounds to dismiss all of Sony’s claims.
“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 filing.
“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 claims Sony is attempting to transform ‘ubiquitous genre ingredients into proprietary assets’
Tencent described Sony’s attempt to brand Horizon as being unlike any “fictional world created before [or] since” as a “startling” bid to monopolize popular video game elements.
“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,” added 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.”
Tencent said Sony has “tellingly” ignored the above facts in an effort 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,” adds Tencent.
In conclusion, Tencent asserts the lawsuit filed by Sony consists “almost entirely of speculative allegations” related to possible future conduct and should be dismissed as a result.
“These allegations of hypothetical future involvement in preparations for a forthcoming beta test and eventual game release—and vague allegations of unspecified ‘current’ involvement in the same—are insufficient to support the exercise of subject matter jurisdiction.”
“The Court therefore lacks jurisdiction to decide the claims against the Served Defendants (even if they were adequately pled, which they are not, see supra III.B.) and should dismiss them on this independent basis.”
You can read the full document on Court Listener.
