When Light of Motiram was first presented to the world, it didn't take long at all for many to regard the game as a rather shameless copy of Guerrilla Games' Horizon series. The visuals, theme, design inspiration... Many of the various parts of the game seemed to state that Tencent and developers Aurora Studio and Polaris Quest had looked at the popular action-adventure series for inspiration, something Sony also took as an offence too.
The massive entertainment company soon filed a lawsuit that made the argument that Light of Motiram was a "slavish clone" of Horizon and that it was an unlawful attempt to capitalise on the success of the Sony Interactive Entertainment-owned series. At the time, Tencent did not issue a reply to this lawsuit, but this has now changed.
As per The Game Post, it's reported that Tencent is looking to take on Sony's lawsuit under the grounds that it's "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 goes further to pick apart Sony's claim, including that the statement saying Horizon was "like no fictional world created before [or] since" is in fact "flatly contradicted by Sony's own developers, not to mention the long history of video games featuring the same elements that Sony seeks to monopolize through this lawsuit."
The response goes on to explain: "Sony's Complaint tellingly ignores these facts. Instead, it tries 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."
None of this changes the fact that Light of Motiram changed many of its Steam page assets soon after the lawsuit was filed...
It's unclear what will happen next, but as it stands, Light of Motiram is still slated to launch on PC sometime in Q4 2027.