Riot sued the publisher Moonton for years for copyright infringement. Moonton has now turned the tables on Riot and is suing them.
This is how quickly the tables can turn. For years, a legal dispute existed between Riot Games and Moonton Technology. The Chinese company allegedly copied Riot’s “League of Legends: Wild Rift” for its mobile game. But now Moonton filed a lawsuit against Riot and claims the opposite.
Creedy copies and first lawsuits
The legal battle between Riot, or its parent company Tencent, and Moonton has spanned years. Moonton is said to be copying the “League of Legends” brand with their mobile games
The focus of the dispute is Moonton’s mobile game “Mobile Legends: Bang Bang”. This was released in 2016 and has enjoyed great popularity since then.
But before that, there was another game by Moonton that was a thorn in Riot’s side: “Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA”. This was removed from various app platforms after a complaint by Riot to Google in 2016.
However, shortly after and with slight adjustments, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang was released. In 2017, Riot sued Moonton over this. After the case was moved to China and Tencent got involved, according to (The Esports Observer) a sum of $2.9 million was reportedly negotiated.
Riot lawsuit dismissed
After the release of Riot’s mobile game Wild Rift in 2020, Mobile Legends received some updates. These allegedly inserted copied expression elements from Wild Rift.
This was followed by another lawsuit by Riot Games and Tencent in 2022, which was however dismissed. The judge accused Tencent of not being able to present any new allegations and thus only wanting to suppress a competition.
Moonton now strikes back
But Moonton doesn’t seem to want to let the non-ending legal dispute go to waste and is striking back. According to the South China Morning Post, Tencent has been scheduled to appear before the Shanghai Intellectual Property Court to defend itself against the allegations of copyright infringement and obstruction of copying and communication.
Tencent already had to pay Moonton about 34,000 dollars in October. However, that involved a defamation lawsuit in which Riot Games was not involved.
In 2021, Moonton was acquired by the tech giant ByteDance for four million dollars. This also owns the successful social media platform TikTok. Tencet was also in talks for the takeover at the time.
