In late 2024, Tencent released the action game Magic Light, which bore striking similarities to Sony's Horizon series and drew attention to the similarities. The two companies have been engaged in a legal battle, and neither side appears to be backing down.
Sony has filed a new lawsuit against Tencent, accusing the Chinese company of attempting to deflect attention and evade responsibility for producing a Horizon clone. Sony alleges that Tencent made minor changes to the Magic Light page, removing the Aloy-like protagonist from the main image, but continued development of the game and retained the game's style—a post-apocalyptic world populated by mechanical beasts, similar to Horizon.
Tencent claims Sony's lawsuit should be dismissed because it sued the wrong companies. Sony is suing Tencent's US subsidiaries, Proxima Beta US, and Tencent Holdings, even though Polaris Quest (Aurora Studio), a subsidiary of Tencent Technology in China, and Proxima Beta PTE, a Singapore-based subsidiary of Tencent Games, were responsible for development and publishing. However, Sony wasn't happy with this strategy: it insisted that Tencent Holdings, which claimed to be the direct owner of the development studio, should be held accountable for its actions.
The legal dispute between Sony and Tencent began in the summer of 2025. Initially, Sony accused its rival of plagiarizing Horizon's intellectual property when creating Light of Magic. Tencent responded by claiming that Sony was attempting to appropriate obvious pop culture concepts and elements.
