Bethesda Sues Westworld Mobile Devs for Copying Code

Bethesda Softworks, the publisher of the Fallout franchise, has filed a suit against the developers of the Westworld mobile game. This is because they believed they copied code used in the similar mobile game, Fallout Shelter.

The companies in question are Behaviour Interactive and Warner Bros. Specifically, Behaviour Interactive was commissioned for the development of the base management game, Fallout Shelter. The same studio was then hired by Warner Bros for making their own base management game for the popular sci-fi TV show, Westworld.

Bethesda claims that Behaviour has re-used code from Fallout Shelter in Westworld Mobile. When Behaviour was hired by Bethesda, they signed a contract stating that all code written during development belongs to Bethesda.

How can they tell, though? According to a statement by Bethesda, a glitch with the game's view previously present in Fallout Shelter can be replicated in the Westworld game.

"Specifically, the view is out-of-focus and the scene that appears is far to the right and below the targeted landscape image. It is as if a camera capturing the scene had been inadvertently pointed to the lower right foreground and then slowly refocuses on the central image. The identical problem appeared in initial versions of Fallout Shelter but was addressed before Fallout Shelter was released to the public."

The company, aside from the copied code, is also discontent with a number of other similarities between the two games. Such similarities they noticed were the same animations and certain UI elements being having the same location and appearance as Fallout Shelter. Bethesda is currently requesting that Westworld Mobile be canceled and removed from distribution.

Finding and recreating a bug to identify their game code might be the most Bethesda thing I've ever reported.