A six-month old lawsuit over a Westworld game allegedly being a “ripoff” of Bethesda’s base-building mobile game Fallout Shelter has come to a close. The two companies have announced in a press release that they’ve ‘amicably’ resolved the lawsuit.
In a press release sent out last night, Matt Frary, Bethesda’s Director of Public Relations, said the following:
Bethesda Softworks and Behaviour Interactive jointly announced today that the parties have amicably resolved the lawsuit Bethesda brought against Behaviour and others related to the Fallout® Shelter and Westworld mobile games.
Polygon’s reporting on this resolution has some additional details. A notice was filed in federal court on December 12 that both sides had resolved their dispute and would pay their own costs and attorney fees. In addition, Bethesda dismissed their claims with prejudice, which means that they can’t bring the same charges up again.
The lawsuit originated from June 2018 when Bethesda claimed that the video game company Behavior Interactive used copyrighted code from Fallout Shelter, which it co-developed with Bethesda and released in 2015, for a similar base-building game themed around the show Westworld. A key part of their argument was based on a bug that was present in the early versions of both games. Warner Bros., who hold the rights to Westworld and published the base-building mobile game, disputed the claims and assured Bethesda that no code from Fallout Shelter was used in their game.
The Westworld mobile game is still available for free (with in-app purchases) on the iOS app store and the Google Play store.