This file photo provided by NCsoft Corp. shows a picture of its leading game Lineage M.
SEOUL, Aug. 18 (Korea Bizwire) — A Seoul court on Friday sided with NCsoft Corp., one of the country’s leading online game developers, over allegations that a smaller game company had plagiarized its leading game Lineage M.
NCsoft Corp. filed the intellectual property suit against the video game developer Webzen in June 2021, claiming it had imitated the contents and systems of its leading game.
The plaintiff argued that Webzen had not just borrowed a part of its system but copied the entire systematic connecting components that influence the game economy.
Webzen countered that having similar game rules does not equate to copyright infringement and that the Lineage game series had also borrowed the rules of “Nethack,” an open source role-playing video game (RPG) that came out in 1987.
The Seoul Central District Court sided with NCsoft Corp. and ordered Webzen to pay 1 billion won (US$747,043) to the plaintiff.
The court also banned the reproduction or distribution of the games and ads provided under the name of R2M, the game suspected of plagiarism in the case.
“The ruling has significant meaning in that it recognized intellectual property rights, which are core assets of a company, and the copyright and creativity of game contents,” NCsoft Corp. said after the ruling.
The company plans to expand the scope of the claim subject to compensation.
Lineage M is a widely popular game launched in 2017, and the game, along with its two other series, had placed among the top five in sales in the country’s Google Play and Apple Store from February 2022 to 2023.
R2M was launched by Webzen in August 2020 as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
Meanwhile, NCsoft Corp. also filed a civil suit against Kakao Games and its subsidiary XLGAMES in April, accusing them of plagiarizing Lineage 2M, a sequel of Lineage M, which was launched in 2019.
(Yonhap)
