![]() “In some agreements, there is a differentiation between game assets and developer tools. “It’s somewhat curious that Bethesda did not attach the development agreement to the complaint,” Huffman said in an email to GameDaily. However, Brandon Huffman, founder of Odin Law and Media and general counsel of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), which he is not directly speaking for, talked with GameDaily over email about this lawsuit and stated that developer tools and game assets aren’t necessarily the same thing. ![]() Without these kinds of contractual relationships, AAA publishers like Bethesda would never hire out for the smaller “flavor” projects like Fallout Shelter or Elder Scrolls Legends - they’d have to develop everything in-house, for fear of misappropriation (or the potential for misrepresentation) of their IP. This is standard contractual language that allows third-party developers like Behaviour to work on established IP with big audiences (and bigger expectations). While Bethesda can’t speak to the intentions of either Behaviour or Warner Bros., from the outside, it looks fairly transparent.Īs with any work-for-hire contract, the company doing the hiring (in this case, Bethesda) retains all rights to the intellectual property generated during development, including “all associated version and derivatives,” in addition to any assets, “know-how, patents, trade secrets.” seek to attract consumers with the expectation of a Fallout Shelter-type gameplay experience,” the complaint reads. “By utilizing Bethesda’s copyright and other intellectual property rights, Behaviour and Warner Bros. At the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal because similar games are made all the time.īut Westworld isn’t just similar - Bethesda has alleged that there is proprietary code lurking under the affable android-western aesthetic. The game was enjoyable and had the flavor elements that the journalists in the room had appreciated about Fallout Shelter. No one in the room was particularly perturbed by the comparison, because it was meant to be a compliment. GameDaily had a chance to look at the Westworld mobile game during GDC 2018 and the first thing that was said once we were taken through the demo was to remark how similar the game was to Fallout Shelter. If this agreement called out developer tools in another section, the court might be able to conclude that Behaviour only reused its own tools to create a similar game, but given the language included in the complaint, I think it would be a stretch. This, in and of itself, is enough to sink any potential comments from Behaviour about using a similar concept, but not the same code. Perhaps the most damning allegation is “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.” Bugs inherent in early versions of Fallout Shelter, explicitly detailed in the document in section 8, are also present in the recently released Westworld game. 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.” It’s not as though Fallout Shelter is a small-potatoes game.īethesda alleges, in section 7 of the document: “The Westworld game is a blatant rip-off of Fallout Shelter. Fallout Shelter has recently made its way onto the Nintendo Switch, in addition to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Bethesda hired Behaviour to develop Fallout Shelter in 2014, which has since surpassed 100 million downloads since its release on mobile. In the document, which is embedded below, Bethesda detailed the agreement set in place for Behaviour’s work-for-hire project, code-named “Underground” - Fallout Shelter. Entertainment, as a result of the game’s development and subsequent launch. Bethesda Softworks has filed the lawsuit to deal with Behaviour’s “breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets” and WB’s “inducement to breach of contract, copyright infringement, and unfair competition.” The complaint, which was filed in the southern district of Maryland on June 21, details the grievances between Bethesda and Behaviour, as well as Warner Bros. Entertainment and Behaviour Interactive have been named in a lawsuit over the release of the new Westworld mobile game of the same name.
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