January 16, 2019 After a lawsuit alleging that Westworld Mobile had ripped off Fallout Shelter was settled, the HBO-licensed game is set to shut down.
Westworld Mobile is set to shut down soon. This comes after a lawsuit in which Bethesda alleged that the game was a “blatant rip-off” of Fallout Shelter. Developer Behaviour Interactive and Bethesda announced that they had “amicably resolved” the suit earlier this month, but did not provide details on the terms of that settlement.
The player-facing message from Westworld Mobile makes no mention of why the game is shutting down. It’s already been pulled from the iOS App Store and Google Play, and will shut down entirely on April 16. In the meantime, players are advised to use up any remaining in-game currency. “We are sorry to see the Westworld mobile game go,” the developers write, “and had an incredible time creating new content and events for players to enjoy.”
Bethesda and Behaviour announced earlier this month “that the parties have amicably resolved the lawsuit Bethesda brought against Behaviour and others related to the Fallout Shelter and Westworld mobile games,” though did not provide any further details.
Westworld Mobile is similar in design to Fallout Shelter, but Bethesda’s claims were much more substantial than that. Both titles were developed by Behaviour, and the suit filed June 21 in Maryland – uncovered by IGN-argues that “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.”
— Westworld Mobile (@WestworldMobile) January 15, 2019
Among other things, Bethesda cited a specific bug in support of their argument that code has been inappropriately reused. In the Westworld game, there’s a camera glitch where “the view is out-of-focus and the scene that appears is far to the right and below the targeted landscape image.” Bethesda says an identical glitch was present in pre-release version of Fallout Shelter, and indicates the reuse of code in the Westworld game.
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Publisher Warner Bros. responded with a broad denial of Bethesda’s claims, saying that “the assertions by Bethesda Softworks that Warner’s Westworld mobile game improperly used source code from Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter are as surprising as they are unsubstantiated.”
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