Riot Games Suing NetEase Over a Valorant ‘Copy’

The game developer Riot Games is suing Chinese publisher NetEase for an undisclosed but “substantial(Opens in a new window)” figure, over a five-on-five mobile shooter called Hyper Front that Riot says is a carbon copy of Valorant.

Hyper Front and Valorant are free-to-play first-person shooters where teams of five play against each other in varying modes. Valorant was released by Riot Games in 2020 on Windows PC, with the company currently working on a mobile version, announced in 2021. The shooter averaged more than 14 million(Opens in a new window) players per month last year, according to Polygon. 

In one lawsuit filed in the UK, Riot Games alleges a number of similarities between the two games such as characters, maps, weapons, weapon skins, and charms, and have made comparisons to weapon stats. The lawsuit, which can be read here(Opens in a new window), shows that NetEase modified Hyper Front slightly after first being alerted to the copying claims by Riot Games, but copyright infringement issues are still unresolved.

NetEase published Hyper Front in 2022 on Android and iOS and is listed on Google Play(Opens in a new window) as having more than 1 million downloads and over 48,000 reviews. As Polygon note, it is not currently possible to play the game in the US.

Speaking to Polygon, Riot Games lawyer Dan Nabel said that the company is bringing the case to courts in the UK, Germany, Brazil, and Singapore, with the main issue in all lawsuits being that Hyper Front is a “substantial” copy of Valorant. 

Nabon added: “All of our creative choices are mirrored in NetEase’s game. We don’t think that changing the color of a character ability or slightly modifying the visual appearance changes the fact that it’s copyright infringement. It’s like that old saying, ‘You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.’”

This isn’t the first lawsuit Riot Games has filed in regard to copied games. In recent years, the company sued over a League of Legends(Opens in a new window) and a Teamfight Tactics(Opens in a new window) ‘copy’. And in 2018, through its parent company Tencent Holdings, Riot Games won a $2.9 million lawsuit(Opens in a new window), over a different League of Legends lookalike. 

The games company has also had lawsuits filed against itself. In 2021, Riot Games settled a $100 million class-action lawsuit accusing the studio of discrimination, sexual harassment, and unequal pay.

Riot Games was made to distribute a minimum of $80 million among 2,365 women employed at the company—full-time, part-time, and temporarily—from November 2014 to the present.