Bethesda Sues Warner - Is Fallout Shelter Being Cloned?! [VIDEO]

General news News 06/24/2018

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Bethesda thinks Warner Bros. and Behaviour Interactive‘s new mobile game, Westworld (which is a sci-fi thriller franchise that has a new series on HBO at the moment), is just a blatant copy of Fallout Shelter, and thus, they sue Warner and Behaviour.

Polygon uploaded the lawsuit document to Scribd, but before we get into the subject, let’s discuss why the lawsuit exists. Behaviour Interactive developed Fallout Shelter (which launched on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch recently) for Bethesda under a work-for-hire. Then, they made Westworld for Warner, and it launched recently. Bethesda claims WestWorld uses the same, copyrighted source code as Fallout Shelter, even down to having the same bug that the Fallout game doesn’t have anymore.

Quoting a bit of the lawsuit document: „[…] Under the agreement, all Behaviour work product of any kind, including code, designs, artwork, layouts, and other assets and materials for FALLOUT SHELTER was authored and owned by Bethesda ab initio as works made for hire. […]To bring the Westworld mobile game to market, Behaviour and Warner Bros. utilized Bethesda’s intellectual property without authorization to develop a mobile game […]. Behaviour breached its contract and utilized its restricted access to Bethesda’s intellectual property, including copyrighted code, trade secrets, and other rights, to compress its development timeline, reduce costs, and quickly bring the Westworld mobile game to market, and offer players the widely popular gameplay experience found in FALLOUT SHELTER. […] The Westworld game is a blatant rip-off of FALLOUT SHELTER. Working with the same copyrighted computer code used by FALLOUT SHELTER, Westworld has the same or highly similar game design, art style, animations, features and other gameplay elements as FALLOUT SHELTER, all of which are owned by Bethesda. […]”

Bethesda seeks statutory damages, actual damages, restitution and the profits made by Warner Bros. and Behaviour… and going by the two gameplay videos, they seem to have a point. The games are similar!

Source: WCCFTech

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Angyal Anikó

Anikó, our news editor and communication manager, is more interested in the business side of the gaming industry. She worked at banks, and she has a vast knowledge of business life. Still, she likes puzzle and story-oriented games, like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, which is her favourite title. She also played The Sims 3, but after accidentally killing a whole sim family, swore not to play it again. (For our office address, email and phone number check out our IMPRESSUM)