The legal documents relayed by TechCrunch and Eurogamer mention “a willful and out of control copyright infringementand state that the Korean will seek financial compensation from the targeted companies.
Garena originated the series of titles Free Fire, referred to by Krafton as “barely made-up Battlegrounds pirate clones” and the first part of which had already been the subject of legal action. The aptly named Free Fire: Battlegrounds thus arrived on mobiles shortly after the release of PUBG in 2017, and an agreement was reached between the two parties following this dispute, in Singapore. However, nothing authorized Garena to continue to market its license, and even less to make a new episode of it. Yet that’s what the studio did with Free Fire MAX and what ultimately led Krafton to take the case to US courts.
The company indeed explains that Garena won “hundreds of millions of dollars“by brutally copying multiple elements and mechanics from its flagship game, but it goes further. As we said in the introduction, the digital giants Apple and Google are also among the players targeted by Krafton. The Korean publisher explains that neither of them removed the games from their online store, as they would have been asked to do last December, adding that both had largely taken their share of the sales of these titles via their respective commission systems. Krafton is also targeting YouTube – and therefore Google again – for leaking videos of the games Free Fire.
Krafton believes that it has the right to claim the profits generated by the sale of these clones, in proportions “which will be demonstrated during the trial“. However, it is quite possible that this conflict will be settled long before, behind closed doors and with a checkbook at hand.