Krafton Inc, the owners and developers of PUBG franchise and its multiple games, issued Garena for developing a “copy” of their trademark title and has served notice to Apple and Google as well for distributing this alleged copy.
Garena has developed Free Fire and Free Fire Max and this game are one of the biggest hits in the battle arena genre of mobile games.
A big lawsuit was filed by Krafton in US District Court in California against these three companies. Furthermore, Krafton has also accused Google of hosting gameplay videos of these alleged copies and “numerous posts containing a feature-length Chinese film that is nothing more than a blatantly infringing live-action dramatization of Battlegrounds.”
Krafton developed PUBG a few years ago and made its debut in the mobile gaming industry with the launch of PUBG Mobile by collaborating with Tencent. They also developed some regional versions of this game and launched a futuristic new PUBG game called as PUBG: New State on a mobile platform.
As per the reports, Krafton has said the following:
“Free Fire and Free Fire Max extensively copy numerous aspects of Battlegrounds, both individually and in combination, including Battlegrounds’ copyrighted unique game opening “air drop” feature, the game structure and play, the combination and selection of weapons, armor, and unique objects, locations, and the overall choice of color schemes, materials, and textures.”
Krafton did not take this action out of the blue as they claim to have approached Garena to stop this “exploitation” and apparently, Garena refused to do it. They also approached Google and Apple regarding the distribution of Free Fire and asked YouTube to remove gameplay videos of Free Fire and Free Fire Max.
Krafton claims that Garena has made “hundreds of millions of dollars” from Free Fire and Free Fire Max. The claim also says that Google and Apple have “similarly earned a substantial amount of revenue from their distribution of Free Fire.”
Garena is yet to respond on this big lawsuit and it will be interesting to see how things will pan out in the future.
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