Chinese game dev studio Unico Interactive Ltd. is getting a $1.65 million lawsuit from Blizzard. The reason - ripping off Hearthstone's interface, music, concept and, well, everything else.
This isn't the first time China has blatantly copyied entire games by any means. League of Legends fans will remember the "300 Heroes" clone of League of Legends, in which players could choose from a copyright-infringing variety of heroes like Shrek, Wall-E, the main casts of Naruto and One Piece.
In the linked video, StarCast say how there's probably "no Mandarin word for copyright" and recently it was the Hearthstone community that woke up to that idea. Sleeping Dragon: Heroes of the Three Kingdoms - developed by Unico Interactive and published by The9 - is a digital card game strikingly similar to Blizzard's CCG product not only in terms of interface and graphics but music too.
Unico went even further in their pursuit of creating the perfect Hearthstone clone and even copied the lay-out of the Hearthstone Battle.net page. Yes, with the purple play button and all. (Sleeping Dragon site image courtesy of Blizzpro)
Having, of course, spotted the Hearthstone clone, Blizzard and NeEase, the current published of World of WarCraft in China, have filed a lawsuit of 10 million yuan (approx. $1,56 million USD) against the developers from Unico. The9 has been left out of the lawsuit for now but if a lawsuit against them is filed at some point, this will actually not be their first as Blizzpro remind us how the company was sued for using athletes' likenesses without permission.
It remains to be seen whether the lawsuit will end with victory for Blizzard.
Source: Blizzpro
