Warner Bros sued over ‘Westworld’ game

Video game publisher Bethesda took Warner Bros to court yesterday over a “blatant rip-off” of “Fallout”, one of Bethesda’s games.

In a lawsuit (pdf) filed at the US District Court for the District of Maryland, Southern Division, Bethesda accused Warner Bros and Canadian game developer Behaviour Interactive of copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets.

Bethesda is the maker of “Fallout Shelter”, a mobile game set in the post-apocalyptic universe of Bethesda’s “Fallout” franchise. Players are placed in the role of the “overseer”—a designer and manager of an underground vault of people trying to escape the nuclear wasteland above ground.

According to the claim, Behaviour (which Bethesda hired to help develop “Fallout Shelter” in 2014) collaborated with Warner Bros to create a mobile game app for “Westworld”, a science fiction western TV show.

“ Westworld” focuses on a Wild-West-themed amusement park looked after by robotic hosts. Wealthy patrons visit the park to live out their fantasies.

“To bring the Westworld mobile game to market, Behaviour and Warner Bros utilised Bethesda’s IP without authorisation to develop a mobile game with the same or substantially similar gameplay experience as that provided by the copyrighted ‘Fallout Shelter’ mobile game,” said Bethesda.

Behaviour has allegedly breached its contract through the use of Bethesda’s copyright-protected code, trade secrets and other rights to “compress its development timeline, reduce costs, and quickly bring the ‘Westworld’ mobile game to market”.

The breach is shown by the gameplay of “Westworld”, which uses the same copyright-protected computer code, added Bethesda.

“Behaviour’s use of the computer code owned by Bethesda to develop Westworld even included the very same ‘bugs’ or defects present in the ‘Fallout Shelter’ code,” said the claim.

One of the ‘bugs’, which causes the screen view to go out-of-focus when a player starts up the demonstration version of the “Westworld” game, was reportedly also present in an early version of Bethesda’s game.

Bethesda is seeking an injunction against Warner Bros and Behaviour forcing them to remove the “Westworld” game from distribution and stop development.

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