Sony's PlayStation Sues Tencent Over Its ‘Slavish Clone' of ‘Horizon' Video Game Franchise
Per a lawsuit filed July 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Sony Interactive Entertainment is alleging Tencent's upcoming game 'Light of Motiram' is a 'slavish clone' of the 'Horizon Zero Dawn' and 'Horizon Forbidden West' video games.
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PlayStation says its seeking to 'to prevent the imminent release of 'Light of Motiram' — a slavish clone of SIE's immensely popular, award-winning Horizon series of video games. Tencent's copying of Horizonis so blatant that the public has described it as 'crazy,' 'insane,' and 'shameless.' Tencent also used its rip-off of the iconic Horizon main character 'Aloy' as the centerpiece of its pre-release marketing and promotional strategy, deliberately causing numerous game lovers to confuse 'Light of Motiram' as the next game in the 'Horizon' series when encountering Tencent's promotional game play videos and social media accounts.'
The lawsuit requests statutory damages of $150,000 for each separate work in the 'Horizon' franchise infringed or of 'SIE's actual damages sustained as a result of Defendants' acts of copyright infringement,' as well as other monetary damages.
Representatives for both PlayStation and Tencent did not immediately respond to request for comment Monday.
Tencent has not yet set a release date for 'Light of Motiram,' which it describes as follows: 'In a world overrun by colossal machines, explore the vast open world, build your base of operations, advance technology, train Mechanimals, and take on formidable bosses. Starting from the primitive age, forge a new path of development. Defy the machination, survive with mechanimals.'
For comparison, here is PlayStation's description for 2017's 'Horizon Zero Dawn,' the first game in its 'Horizon' series: 'In a far future where colossal machines roam and rule the Earth, pockets of humanity survive in unique tribes among the lush, overgrown ruins of our long-lost civilization. Take up bow and spear as Aloy, a young machine hunter and outcast of her tribe, as she discovers her origins, the truth of this mysterious world, and her own destiny to save it from impending doom. '
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Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Need a camera to play Super Mario Jamboree? These are the Switch 2 cameras I'd grab right now
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The Nintendo Switch 2 edition of Super Mario Jamboree dropped last month, bringing with it a smorgasbord of brand-new features. There's new mini-games that utilize the Joy-Con 2 controllers' mouse controls, more rule sets, GameShare support, and most importantly, the game now makes the most of the new gaming handheld and its camera capabilities. If you have one of the best Switch 2 cameras at the ready, you can let your friends see your cheeky face as you steal stars, or as you shed a tear or two when the RNG doesn't quite go your way. Better yet, there's a new Bowser Live mode, which is entirely built around camera support with Sony Eye Toy-like gameplay for up to 4 players, which is entirely dependent on owning a camera. If you don't have one, don't fret. There's a whole bunch of compatible webcams out there for you to try out - so long as it uses a USB-C cable, you should be good to go. But for those of you who'd prefer the reassurance of an official first-party version, whether it's for some reassurance or you need the cute Hori Piranha Plant camera in your life, I've picked out all the official ones out there down below. The official Nintendo Switch 2 Camera isn't much to look at, but it will make your face look crystal clear with its 1080p resolution and it's handheld-mod ready too, so long as you have a spare surface for it to sit Hori USB Camera is compact in size and more ideal for those with limited space for their Switch 2 accessories, and you can even plug it directly into the top USB-C port of the Ninty handheld for some portable Super Mario Party Jamboree Hori Piranha Plant Camera is one of the most iconic official Switch 2 accessories so far, and transforms the iconic baddie into an adorable 480p camera, which can be used with the dock or on the buy a Switch 2 camera for Super Mario Jamboree? The brand-new Switch 2 edition of Super Mario Jamboree launched on July 24, and like the rest of the existing Switch 2 games lineup, it makes the most of the camera compatibility to introduce new game modes to spice things up a bit. Naturally, that means if you want to take advantage of everything the new version has to offer, you'll need either an official Switch 2 camera or a compatible webcam. Without them, you can still destroy friendships and play through the seven existing boards and game modes, but the brand-new Bowser Live segment relies entirely on the existence of a camera in order to place you, and three of your best pals, into the game. Nintendo Switch 2 Camera Resolution: 1080pConnectivity: USB-CHandheld mode compatible? Yes Great for: ✅ Super Mario Jamboree✅ Those with the space for its stand✅ Switch 2 GameChat Avoid if: ❌ You hate the boring design❌ You play mostly in handheld mode Compatible with: Game Chat, Mario Kart World, Super Mario Party Jamboree – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV View Deal The official Nintendo Switch 2 camera isn't that exciting to look at, but what it lacks in looks, it makes up for in specs - especially compared to the rest of the official Switch 2 camera lineup. The camera, which is still available for $54 at Amazon has a resolution of 1080p, which is pretty much what you'd want from any webcam, never mind one intended specifically for your new Ninty console. Even with a 1080p resolution, you'll still want to ensure your Switch 2 environment is as well-lit as possible, as this will go a long way in ensuring you and your friends appear nice and clear in Super Mario Jamboree - trust me, catching a glimpse of your friends' star envy in real-time and in his-res is worth it. It might not look it, but the official Switch 2 camera can also be used in handheld mode, so you can curl up on the sofa with Jamboree while re-watching the Super Mario Bros Movie on your TV. It still requires a flat surface to rest on, so it's not the most portable friendly camera of this bunch, so make sure you have a flat surface going spare first. Hori USB Camera for Nintendo Switch 2 Resolution: 480pConnectivity: USB-CHandheld mode compatible? 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This is less helpful for playing Bowser Live, and more helpful for GameChat, as your video chats with your friends don't have to end just because you want to pop a TV show on in the background and roam about your Hori camera also comes with a built-in sliding lens for privacy, and it has an adjustable neck so you can get the best viewing angle to show off your pretty face while playing Super Mario Party Jamboree, or even Mario Kart World, for that matter. HORI Piranha Plant Camera for Nintendo Switch 2 Resolution: 480pConnectivity: USB-CHandheld mode compatible? Yes Great for: ✅ Super Mario Jamboree✅ Die-hard Super Mario fans✅ Privacy-conscious players ✅ Those who need their Switch 2 setup as cute as possible Avoid if: ❌ Having a 1080p camera is a must❌ You're more of a Goomba fan Compatible with: Game Chat, Mario Kart World, Super Mario Party Jamboree – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV View Deal If you want a camera that evokes the same childlike wonder as playing through your favorite Nintendo games, the Hori Piranha Plant Switch 2 is the one for you. Out of every single officially licenced Switch 2 accessory so far, it's undoubtedly the most adorable as it takes the iconic and ferocious Mario baddie and transforms it into a practical bit of gaming tech. This camera won't chuck fireballs your way, but its mouth can be closed to act as a privacy slider, it has an adjustable stem, and it can be hooked up to your Switch 2 via your Switch 2 dock, or the USB-C port on your handheld itself. To do this, all you have to do is dislodge the Piranha Plant from its Mario pipe base and pop it into the USB-C port on the top of your handheld, and viola - all the fun Super Mario Jamboree times can be had. Just like the HORI USB camera, you've only got a 480p resolution at play here, which is a bit of a bummer. Again, the best way to circumnavigate any blurry imagery on-screen is to ensure your room is as well-lit as humanely possible. Whether you care more about your Switch 2 camera aesthetics than the picture quality is up to you, but 480p is still plenty to get the most out of Super Mario Jamboree. Check out our where to buy a Nintendo Switch 2 hub if you still have yet to grab one of the best gaming handhelds for yourself. Our best Nintendo Switch accessories guide is also full to the brim with Switch-2 compatible goodies to make your new Ninty setup complete.
USA Today
8 hours ago
- USA Today
America's fascination with the kiss cam: For better or worse, it's here to stay
'Are you not entertained?' Russell Crowe's Maximus famously bellowed to the Colosseum crowd in the 2000 film 'Gladiator.' But for decades, kiss cams have been posing a different question to U.S. sports fans and concertgoers: 'Are you not the entertainment?' Whether lighthearted distraction or comic relief, the ubiquitous arena and stadium feature is as American as apple pie — or at least as American as baking an apple pie and posting it on social media. Live competition and performance offer us communal experience on a massive scale, but they also offer a chance to make memories and — with the aid of kiss cams — to become part of the entertainment ourselves. For a few back-to-back moments, as the camera zeroes in on its various targets, fans watch with curiosity, anticipation, excitement and maybe even self-conscious dread. 'These events are epic, nostalgic, and for some even narcissistic,' said Adam Resnick, founder of 15 Seconds of Fame, a Los Angeles-based company whose app allows participating fans featured on in-venue video boards like kiss cams to download and share the footage as a digital souvenir. The origins of the kiss cam are frustratingly foggy but Resnick and others agree they burst onto sports scenes in the 1980s, in the years after sports franchises began introducing increasingly massive color video screens at ballparks and stadiums. Designed to fill breaks in the action and typically set to cheesy pop ballads, the kiss cam was a major innovation that shifted the focus from courts and fields into the stands. The feature is pretty much a slam dunk, with the camera's roving eye picking out random pairs of people in the stands who may or may not be actual couples — and therein lies part of the fun. Reactions are broadcast on the venue's giant video boards: If they kiss, the crowd cheers, while refusals draw playful jeers or laughter. "We love love," said Pepper Schwartz, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. When couples oblige, she said, "it's a feel-good feeling that transfers from one person to another and makes us optimistic." Kiss cams are cheap entertainment designed to keep audiences engaged when they could easily check out, said Joseph Darowski, an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. 'The energy of the live crowd is incredibly important, and the kiss cam helps to prevent it from dying down,' said Darowski, co-author of 'Survivor: A Cultural History,' a book that in part explores the rise of reality TV. 'Sporting events are not just about the game being played. It's the entire entertainment experience.' Any additional theatrics are generally a bonus — at least for the audience. But as illustrated by the now infamous July 16 incident at a Coldplay concert in Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, that's not always the case for the featured individuals. When reactions tell the story It was the shot broadcast around the world – the TikTok'd footage of a couple at a Coldplay concert caught mid-cuddle. 'Either they're having an affair, or they're just very shy,' Coldplay singer Chris Martin quipped after seeing the video from the stage. The video of the July 16 incident at Gillette Stadium has received more than 129 million views on TikTok alone. The viral moment and its professional and personal fallout, Schwartz said, prompted reactions ranging from amusement and fascination to, for those who've been involved in similar circumstances, schadenfreude and relief. But it wouldn't have unfolded the way it did without the kiss cam. The couple seen on the screen "could have saved themselves from worldwide derision had they waved and looked like, 'This is no big deal,'" Schwartz said. "But they took the second instinct, which was to flee. And that was the funny one." 'It could have been a vanilla, fleeting moment,' Resnick agreed. 'However, their reaction told a story." The episode illustrated how kiss cams have provoked occasional embarrassment and controversy since their debut. In addition to outing potential infidelities, their use in the past has been accused of pressuring unwilling participants to take part and shamed for promoting homophobia by showing same-sex couples for laughs. It also showed the hazards of baring private matters in public in the age of kiss cams, smartphones and social media. 'The expectation of privacy at a public event has never existed, and today, with camera ubiquity, it's preposterous for anyone to take that position,' Resnick said. More often, though, kiss cams offer those attending live events the chance to score a cameo in their own experience, claiming part or even all of those 15 seconds of fame once foretold for all of us. The power of those moments, Resnick said, lies in their organic nature. 'Authenticity can't be staged in real time,' he said. 'It resonates in the social zeitgeist.' Kiss cams 'an important metric' of acceptance The kiss cam's evolution hasn't been without its stumbles. In 2015, Syracuse University discontinued its kiss cam feature after a letter to the local newspaper cited a pair of troubling instances at the football team's game against Wake Forest. Steve Port of Manlius, N.Y., wrote that the kiss cam segment had twice featured young women who expressed unwillingness to participate but were forced to anyway, either by their male counterpart or by surrounding students. Meanwhile, a dozen or so years have passed since some major league sports franchises were accused of promoting homophobia by using kiss cams to poke fun at other teams. In those cases, after featuring a series of smooching male-female couples, the kiss cam segments ended by focusing on two of the home team's rival players, or even fans – suggesting they might kiss, and that doing so would be comedic. As a fan of the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars complained after such a segment in a 2013 letter to team owner Shahid Khan, initially reported by Outsports: 'Hilarious, right? No, and the message is clear. Jaguars are heterosexual and approved. The opponent is 'gay,' disapproved and the butt of a crude joke.' A year earlier, pitcher Brandon McCarthy of Major League Baseball's Oakland A's had similarly condemned the practice after a game against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. 'They put two guys on the 'Kiss Cam' tonight,' McCarthy posted on the social platform now known as X. 'What hilarity!! (by hilarity I mean offensive homophobia). Enough with this stupid trend.' Later, McCarthy — now sporting director for the USL Championship's Phoenix Rising FC — told the San Francisco Chronicle: "If there are gay people who are coming to a game and seeing something like that, you can't assume they're comfortable with it. If you're even making a small group of people ... feel like outcasts, then you're going against what makes your model successful." Before long, franchises were striving to be more inclusive, and in 2015, MLB's New York Mets told the Huffington Post they would no longer feature opposing players in their kiss cam segments; that same year, the Dodgers included a gay couple in its kiss cam. 'Kiss cams are an important metric in measuring how acceptable certain people are in a given community,' said Stephanie Bonvissuto, an adjunct assistant professor of women's and gender studies at Hunter College and Brooklyn College, both part of the City University of New York system. In early 2017, the Ad Council's 'Love Has No Labels' campaign produced a commercial featuring kiss cam footage from that year's NFL Pro Bowl in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people had been killed seven months earlier in a mass shooting at gay nightclub Pulse. 'Kiss Cams have been a part of sports culture for years,' the opening text read, but at that game, it continued, they 'became part of something bigger.' The images showed pairs of individuals, outlined by a heart, broadcast on Camping World Stadium's giant screens. Friends were featured. So, too, were same-sex and interracial couples. Then the camera zoomed in on two women in the stands, one of them wearing a shirt reading 'Orlando survivor.' The two turned and kissed, to the crowd's delight. Still, Bonvissuto said it's still rare to see LGBTQ couples featured on kiss cams beyond Pride Night events. While cautioning that she hasn't seen any statistics on such representation, she said the footage she's viewed largely features white, able-bodied and seemingly cisgender individuals. 'Kiss cams act as a means to exclude certain people,' she said. 'They're incredibly important in thinking about representation — who we're seeing and not seeing.' 'Socially acceptable' voyeurism But for the most part, kiss cams have offered streams of harmless fun, fodder for highlight and blooper reels and glimpses into the relationships of everyone from fellow citizens to celebrities and sitting and former U.S. presidents. Kiss cams, said BYU's Darowski, offer audiences the constant thrill of knowing they could be onscreen combined with 'a socially acceptable, safe form of voyeurism that is traditionally taboo.' The presumed authenticity of couples' raw, unrehearsed reactions is key, too, he said. 'So much of our entertainment is highly mediated, edited and packaged for our consumption,' he said. It doesn't always play out as planned – and not all of it is necessarily genuine, thanks to some sports teams' creative minds. Many couples share crowd-pleasing kisses. Others, not so much. Some, snubbed by their companions, stomp off in a huff or peck adjacent fans instead, while youthful pairs looking to lock lips are thwarted by chaperoning adults. Whether any of it is staged doesn't matter much. Fans and audiences alike have enjoyed their moment in the limelight. Resnick, of 15 Seconds of Fame, recalled a moment in June 2024 after a Dallas Mavericks loss in game five of the NBA Finals. The arena cameras zeroed on a fan tearful over the outcome. While it wasn't part of the kiss cam feature, 'the minute he saw himself on the Jumbotron, he smiled and kissed the girl (who was) with him,' Resnick said. 'That's all you need to know about what those 15 seconds mean to fans.'
Business Insider
9 hours ago
- Business Insider
MrBeast's plan to reach a new generation of fans
MrBeast has been in the lab cooking up an animated show that he hopes will hook the next generation on his videos. The world's biggest YouTuber announced a new anime-style series coming in October called "MrBeast Lab: The Descent," based on a wildly popular toy line he launched last summer. MrBeast and his team partnered with Australia-based Moose Toys for both the animated show and his "MrBeast Lab" toys. Those action figures debuted last July and became the best-selling new toy property in 2024 across 12 leading global markets tracked by retail sales data provider Circana, the company confirmed to Business Insider. Stephen Davis, the chief franchise officer at Moose Toys, told BI that his team had been talking with MrBeast about making an animated series for a while. The success of their MrBeast-inspired toys last holiday season convinced both sides to make an animated series that would fuel sales for new versions of their toys — and vice versa. "With the launch of this next product line, it was the right time to now move into animation," Davis said. Besides generating millions of YouTube views and selling tons of toys, MrBeast — whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson — is moving into animation to grow his already-massive audience, specifically by introducing himself to younger viewers. "We wanted to create a show that was as inviting to a younger demo as it was to an older demo," Davis said. Growing the tent to fit Gen Alpha Animation isn't just for kids, as the recent breakout success of Netflix's "Kpop Demon Hunters" demonstrates. Davis emphasized that point, saying that the "MrBeast Lab" show's "modern anime flavor" could help expand the fandom while also appealing to MrBeast's current YouTube subscriber base of over 418 million. Still, industry insiders told BI they thought viewership for MrBeast's animated show would skew younger than his Gen Z -heavy following. "He's filling a white space for his audience," said Amanda Cioletti, the VP of content and strategy for the licensing group at market-making firm Informa Markets. Gen Alpha children, between the ages of one and 15, appear to be a target demographic for this cartoon. Amanda Klecker, SVP of marketing and franchises at toy and kids' media company called developing both a show and toy line targeting a particular audience "a smart move." Please help BI improve our Business, Tech, and Innovation coverage by sharing a bit about your role — it will help us tailor content that matters most to people like you. Continue By providing this information, you agree that Business Insider may use this data to improve your site experience and for targeted advertising. By continuing you agree that you accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . Davis said the audience for the "MrBeast Lab" action figures is kids ages six and older, though he added adults in the so-called "kid-ult" community also buy the toys. MrBeast isn't the only content creator who's dabbling in toys. Kid-focused YouTubers like Ms. Rachel, Ryan of "Ryan's World," and the girl from "Kids Diana Show" have toy lines to reach preschoolers. STEM YouTuber Mark Rober, whose audience is older, is also getting into the mix, with a toy line from Moose Toys coming in 2026. More than a cash grab MrBeast and Moose Toys dream of a virtuous cycle in which toy sales spark interest in their show, and the other way around. Cioletti said that MrBeast likely launched the toys first to feel out the market before making the cartoon. While toy sales data from Circana suggests that the MrBeast-Moose Toys tie-up is lucrative, Davis declined to comment on the terms or structure of his firm's partnership with MrBeast. Klecker said MrBeast's approach to brand building shows he's focused on staying power across generations. "What I appreciate about what MrBeast does is there isn't a 'label slap,'" Klecker said, referring to a hasty money grab trading on a famous name. "He's very thoughtful, it seems, about his brand building and his brand strategy." Smart brand partnerships fulfill unmet needs, she said, adding that MrBeast seems to be on the right track so far.
