PUBG creators sue Google and Apple: Chinese game ‘Free Fire’ is a blatant copy, they say

In China They call it Shanzhai. The culture of the copy. There they don’t see copying as theft, but rather as something positive. That’s probably why they copy relentlessly and shamelessly, but in the West such actions often provoke anger or, in some cases, lawsuits.

That is what has happened with the well-known game ‘PUBG’, whose creators have sued the Chinese company Garena, responsible for the video game ‘Free Fire’, which according to them is a shameless copy. The thing has not stopped there: also they have sued Google and Apple for allowing those copies to be distributed in their app stores and generating multi-million dollar revenue.

This far we could go

Krafton, the company responsible for the development of PUBG, already had its pluses and minuses with Garena when the company sold a game in Singapore in 2017 that also copied PUBG. Both reached an agreement, but according to the new lawsuit, that did not mean that Garena could license his video game.

Whether he did or not, the truth is that ‘Free Fire’ and its derivative version, ‘Free Fire Max’ bear clearly suspicious resemblances to PUBG, something that Krafton has shown with screenshots of both games in which it seems clear that the development is basically the same.

In Krafton they indicate that the Garena game copy all kinds of elements, such as the “drop from the air” feature that makes players start the game by parachuting -although that also happens for example in Fortnite- or the structure of the game, its way of playing it, its selection of weapons or locations and even the choice of colors, materials and textures.

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

The move, whether intentional or not, has allowed Garena to earn a lot of money with ‘Free Fire’. In The Verge they indicate that this game managed to enter 1,100 million dollars in 2021 according to Sensor Tower, an amount that represented a growth of 48% compared to 2020 revenue.

for now neither Google nor Apple have taken action on the matter, even though for example the second acted fast with the clones of the fashionable game, Wordle.

Via | The Verge