Copy of League of Legends sued by Riot Games

The monster success of Riot Games and its MOBA League of Legends has enough to make more than one jealous, and the temptation to be inspired by it or even to copy it completely pushes certain studios to incur the wrath of justice. This is the case of the Shanghai studio Moonton at the origin of the game Mobile Legends.

In 2018, Riot Games then sued this studio for its mobile game, which the American developer then described as a pale copy of its MOBA for PC and Mac. Unsurprisingly, Riot emerged victorious from this lawsuit, then condemning Moonton to pay $ 2.9 million to Tencent, Riot’s parent company in China. Subsequently, Riot also used the findings of the lawsuit to push Google to remove the game from its Play Store to prevent the plagiarized content from continuing to be downloaded by many users.

Unfortunately, these efforts weren’t enough, as Moonton returned to the mobile MOBA market with Mobile Legends: Bang Banga simplified version of the original version of Mobile Legends which is reminiscent of Wild Rift, the official mobile adaptation of League of Legends offered by Riot.

legends of plagiarism

From the game’s logo to the characters and their skins, there’s no doubt where the content of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang comes from. A simple comparison shows that it is not a question of inspiration but of pure and hard plagiarism. A Twitter user took care to present the most egregious examples:

This is some of the proof Riot putting forward in their lawsuit against Mobile Legends, for basically copying them https://t.co/aKYdiUM8Pt pic.twitter.com/DziCNHjrQW

—Spideraxe (@Spideraxe30) May 9, 2022

Last January, Riot also sued a Vietnamese studio that had unscrupulously copied their MOBA’s Teamfight Tactics mode. The mobile game market makes it easier to release games and applications, and plagiarized games are legion on the stores, in particular the Google Play Store.

Riot’s evidence against Moonton is overwhelming, and you can find their full case in the complaint file which is freely available:

This case raises the question of content control on mobile platforms where copies and other illicit applications reign supreme to deceive users or surf on the success of other studios or companies.