Bethesda Sues Warner Bros. Over Westworld Game

Bethesda has filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. over a Westworld mobile game that allegedly uses code from Fallout Shelter.

Both games were developed by Behaviour, and the suit claims that:


The Westworld game is a blatant rip-off of FALLOUT SHELTER. Working with the same copyrighted computer code used by FALLOUT SHELTER, Westworld has the same or highly similar game design, art style, animations, features and other gameplay elements as FALLOUT SHELTER, all of which are owned by Bethesda. […] Warner Bros. expected and relied on Behaviour’s ability to reuse and/or leverage Bethesda’s computer code, game designs, and other intellectual property as the foundation for the Westworld game. 

The suit also claims the reaction of many journalists making comparisons between the games adds credence to this.

In addition, the game allegedly shares a bug that was present during the game’s development:

“Behaviour’s breach of its contract with Bethesda is evidenced by the gameplay of Westworld, which uses the same copyrighted computer code created for Bethesda’s FALLOUT SHELTER game. Behaviour’s use of the computer code owned by Bethesda to develop Westworld even included the very same ‘bugs’ or defects present in the FALLOUT SHELTER code. For example, the demonstration version of the Westworld game includes a visible software ‘bug’ or code defect present in an early version of FALLOUT SHELTER code delivered by Behaviour to Bethesda during game development. […] 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.”

You can read the entire suit for yourself here.

In related news, Fallout Shelter was recently ported to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

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Ryan was a former Niche Gamer contributor.


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