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After the launch of their recent My Little Pony mobile game, toy company Hasbro could be facing a lawsuit from a Turkish developer who claims it’s a clone of one of its own games.
The studio, Peak Games, claims that My Little Pony: Puzzle Party mobile game is a copy of its game Toy Blast, a title originally released in August 2015. Puzzle Party was developed internally by Hasbro’s Backflip Studios and was launched earlier this month on Oct 13.
The Turkish developer seems to have noticed the similarities nearly immediately, and according to VentureBeat they’ve filed a lawsuit with the US District Court in San Francisco, accompanied by comparison images showing similarities between the two games’ design, mechanics, text and mechanics.
"When the game was released last week" said Jennifer Kelly, the Fenwick & West partner that represents Peak Games, in a statement to Venture Beat. "it was immediately obvious to all of us that this was just a reskin of Toy Blast. This was only confirmed as we looked at the game more deeply in the subsequent days."
"Peak believes it is obligated to protect its teams’ creativity and hard work, and to discourage others from taking the shortcut of cloning a leading game in the genre. Under this circumstance, we felt it necessary to take the step of filing this action, which Peak has never done before, and did not do lightly."
