The lawsuit has also hit Google and Apple for distribution in their respective stores.
krafton, PUBG developer, filed a lawsuit last Monday, that is, on January 10; against Garena ensuring that the latter company had plagiarized his battle royale in Free Fire and Free Fire Max. Furthermore, the demand it also affects Google and Apple, as they accuse these companies of distributing Garena titles in their stores (App Store and Google Play). Although the thing does not end there, since Krafton has also accused Google for hosting videos of the two Garena titles on YouTube, as well as a Chinese film that, according to the person in charge of PUBG, they assure that it is nothing more than a copy of their mythical PC battle royale.
In Krafton’s lawsuit, the following can be read: “Free Fire and Free Fire Max copy numerous aspects of Battlegrounds, both individually and in combination, including the descent to earth from the air that occurs at the beginning of each game and that is registered and protected content, as well as the structure of the game and its gameplay, the combination and selection of weapons, armor and unique objectives, location, choices of the color palette, materials and textures”.
The creators of PUBG also claim that Garena has won “hundreds of millions of dollars“with the amount of micropayments that both games (Free Fire and Free Fire Max) include and that, therefore, Google and Apple have also profited substantially with the distribution of the titles mentioned.
Update on the below:
1. The directors said it’s not a PUBG movie, despite basically being a PUBG movie.
2. Krafton said they are considering suing given the similarities to the PUBG IP.
3. You can watch it with English subs here: https://t.co/lS1SfdTRhj https://t.co/pBdcsqZttn
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) August 15, 2021
Apparently, Krafton assures that on December 21 asked Garena to cease the distribution of its two titles, a request that was rejected. This situation led the company to ask Google and Apple to remove the games from their respective stores and to remove the related videos from YouTube, something that, without a doubt, it has not been carried out either and has ended up precipitating Krafton filing the lawsuit what concerns us in the news.
To end, Jason Golz, spokesman for Garena’s parent company, Sea, has mentioned to the medium TheVerge that “Krafton’s claims are baseless.” This legal dispute is not the first between both companies, since Krafton assured that Garena sold a game in Singapore in 2017 that “copied PUBG”. Those claims appear to have been settled, but no license agreement was made, according to the lawsuit itself.
Related topics: Mobile
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