It does seem as though it is a day that is full of legal wranglings in the news, and here is yet another case which is worth noting. Blizzard, the ones behind the hugely successful World of Warcraft, has initiated a legal battle with Chinese game studio Unico Interactive, where it will concern a copycat Hearthstone game known as Sleeping Dragon: Heroes of the Three Kingdoms. The titles are extremely different, but when you strip away the name of the title, the games are very similar.
Apart from the shared aesthetics with Hearthstone, Sleeping Dragon has also been heavily inspired in terms of its musical capability based on the other titles from Blizzard, and World of Warcraft would be the main title in question here. Yes sir, in case you didn’t know it, Unico’s card game actually obtains its tunes from the hugely successful Blizzard MMO. In another twist of fate, Sleeping Dragon’s publisher, The9, used to be the World of Warcraft distributor in China at one point in time in the past, and needless to say, this right was removed from them, with the company sued many times over prior to copyright violations by other parties
Blizzard and NetEase (the latter being the existing World of Warcraft publisher in China) will be suing Unico for 10 million yuan (approximately $1.65 million) over copyright infringement. The9 is not involved in the lawsuit, yet.
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