Tencent-Backed PUBG Sues NetEase for Cloning Its Chicken Dinner Games

Duan Qianqian

(Yicai Global) April 9 — PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Corp. (PUBG), developer of shooter game Last Battleground: Survival, recently filed a lawsuit with a federal court in the US state of California against Chinese tech company NetEase Inc. claiming that two mobile games — Rules of Survival and Knives Out — published by the latter infringed its copyrights. The South Korean game developer sought a court order to cease the infringement, demanding that NetEase pay USD15 million in damages for each game.

PUBG provided evidence in its complaint of copyright infringement in the mobile games based on its patented works in support of its claims.

The company also claimed that NetEase used characters and smileys from Last Battleground: Survival to market the two games. For example, ‘Chicken Dinner’ is the slogan to promote Knives Out on Facebook, although the phrase only appeared in Last Battleground: Survival, but not in the Chinese mobile game.

Rules of Survival ranks number three on Google’s Play Store with a search for the keywords ‘PUBG game,’ and a search for ‘PUBG’ on Apple App Store led to the same result. PUBG also accused NetEase of using certain elements of Last Battleground: Survival such as parachutes and supply boxes in promoting Rules of Survival in the Apple Store.

Crying fowl

Last Battleground: Survival was widely regarded as the most notable dark horse in the gaming industry last year. Each match takes 100 players and puts them on a deserted island entirely empty-handed. They must find and use various weapons and items to eliminate opponents, and the player or team that survives the match in the end wins with the congratulatory refrain: ‘winner, winner, chicken dinner.’ Chicken dinner games have since become a mainstream genre in the world of gamers today.

Tencent Holdings Ltd. became Last Battleground: Survival’s distributor for the mainland Chinese market following the acquisition of a five percent stake in PUBG via an affiliate last year. Later, the Shenzhen-based tech giant announced a partnership with PUBG firm to jointly release chicken dinner games.

NetEase uncovered its chicken dinner games for mobile phone users before the mainland distribution deal between Tencent and PUBG. It served out four games within the space of a few weeks: Knives Out came out on Oct. 31, and Rules of Survival on Nov. 4. The beta version of Crossfire: Island Training went live on Nov. 17, about 10 days after the opening of another similar game, Glorious Mission, on Nov. 8.

Knives Out and Rules of Survival were sandbox simulation games independently developed by NetEase, the company said in a statement on popular messaging app WeChat last Friday.

Seems familiar

It is very hard to decide if a game infringes the copyright of another game by looking at its model or design alone, said Guo Chengjie, vice president for interactive research at market research company iResearch Consulting. Last Battleground: Survival has gameplay like that of H1Z2 and to decide if piracy has occurred largely depends on the similarity of scenes and other elements appearing in the games.

The gaming industry has seen numerous copyright disputes to date, the most well-known being the suit brought by the American Blizzard Entertainment Inc. against Beijing Zhongqing Longtu Network Technology Co., and Lilith Games (Shanghai) Co., developers of Dot Arena, in 2015. The American company filed the case jointly with US-based Valve Corp., developer of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), in a US federal court, Haidian district court in Beijing and a Taiwan court.

Dot Arena, has very similar character names to the client-based game DotA, but the US court dismissed the case nonetheless, citing insufficient evidence of infringement.

The PUBG-Netease lawsuits will thus continue until a judge or judges ultimately decide who gets chicken for dinner.