Game publisher Bethesda has filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment and Behaviour Interactive. They allege that Warner and Behaviour ripped off Fallout Shelter to create their newly released Westworld mobile game – and given that Behaviour Interactive helped create Fallout shelter, there’s some merit to the claim.
Behaviour breached its contract with Bethesda and utilized its restricted access to Bethesda’s intellectual property, including Bethesda’s copyrighted code, trade secrets, and other rights, to compress its development timeline, reduce costs, and quickly bring the Westworld mobile game to market, and offer players the widely popular gameplay experience found in Fallout Shelter,” says the suit.” Bethesda is suing for copyright infringement, breach of contract and misappropriating trade secrets. They want a trial as well as damages.
Westworld was released on iOS and Android last week, and bears more than a striking resemblance to Fallout Shelter, including game design, art style and animations. Crucially, Bethesda alleges that a bug that was present in early copies of Fallout Shelter is present in the release code for the Westworld game, which they say is evidence that Fallout Shelter’s code was repurposed. Bethesda said in its suit that Behaviour uses “the same copyrighted computer code created for Fallout Shelter in Westworld,” and that the bug which was fixed for the release of Fallout Shelter is still present in Westworld. Oops.
Bethesda hired Behaviour Interactive to help them developer Fallout Shelter in 2014. The game has since been released on just about everything, Rivalling Skyrim for its platform ubiquity. It was most recently released on the Nintendo Switch after success on mobiles as well as consoles. In 2016, after Westworld’s success, Behaviour was contracted to develop a game for Warner Bros, and it seems they may have tried to get away with doing as little a possible.
Last Updated: June 25, 2018
Captain JJ
June 25, 2018 at 07:44
Man, Bethesda sure does love to sue.
Hammersteyn
June 25, 2018 at 08:46
They’ll sue you for that statement!
Grimsupanoob
June 25, 2018 at 07:55
How else are they gonna make money till a new ES or Fallout actually launches…. Skyrim has been around now on everything since Noah’s ark (and still bloody expensive)
Hammersteyn
June 25, 2018 at 08:46
They can always release another Skyrim?
Captain JJ
June 25, 2018 at 07:57
yea, true
Pariah
June 25, 2018 at 09:16
Fun fact: 2 copies of Skyrim survived that fateful day.
Captain JJ
June 25, 2018 at 09:28
Male and Female… or am I not allowed to assume the gender?
Pariah
June 25, 2018 at 09:29
This is 2018. Who knows, maybe Skyrim will be offended?
Captain JJ
June 25, 2018 at 09:36
Lawsuit incoming
Kromas
June 25, 2018 at 08:02
To be fair the bugs were the same and bethesda knows their bugs.
Captain JJ
June 25, 2018 at 08:05
Hehe, lol.
Whether it’s true or not I’m not disputing at all. But Bethesda has a pretty infamous reputation for suing companies.
Lord Chaos
June 25, 2018 at 08:46
At least they and parent company Zenimax get the facts together before making noise about a frying pan
Lord Chaos
June 25, 2018 at 08:46
At least they and parent company Zenimax get the facts together before making noise about a frying pan
RinceThis
June 25, 2018 at 08:51
Well that’s a bit crap
Captain JJ
June 25, 2018 at 09:09
what do you know?!
th3SiCn3ss
June 25, 2018 at 09:31
After the release & desecration of “Shadow of War” I hopw WB gets ripped a new one…
PestControl
June 25, 2018 at 14:46
Well I’ve spent quite a lot of time playing Fallout shelter in the past… and only some playing Westworld and it’s undeniable that the whole concept feels like a copy… one could almost say they made a Fallout Shelter v2.0 host 🙂