It’s been a bit since we heard any new peeps over Light of Motiram, an in-development survival sandbox from Tencent that earned some snark – and then a straight-up lawsuit from Sony – over its extremely close resemblance to Sony’s Horizon games. When last we reported this past August, Tencent had swapped out images from Motiram’s Steam page to assets that looked far more distinct.

That was then and this is now, as The Game Post reports on Tencent’s response to Sony’s lawsuit in its own legal filing, which attempts to call out Sony for trying to wall off tropes and designs that are ubiquitous of the world Motiram is trying to build.

“At bottom, Sony’s effort is not aimed at fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property. It is an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it Sony’s exclusive domain. […] By suing over an unreleased project that merely employs the same time-honored tropes embraced by scores of other games released both before and after Horizon […] Sony seeks an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions.”

Some of the counter-arguments raised by Tencent’s filing include suggestion that certain devs didn’t even think Horizon was visually distinct when it was being developed, pointing to quotes from Jan-Bart Van Beek, which therefore negates Sony’s suggestion that Horizon is “like no fictional world created before”; that the meeting between Sony and Tencent about use of the Horizon license was not an act of copyright or trademark infringement; and that design concepts of Motiram borrow from a wide range of titles such as Enslaved, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and a couple of games in the Far Cry series, to name a few.

Tencent’s filing then attempts to argue a couple of reasons to have Sony’s lawsuit tossed, both of which amount to dismissal on technicality: The first is that Sony is suing the wrong entities and not the actual developers of Motiram, and the second is that Sony is building a legal case about what the game might look like or might do, while claiming that “alleged infringements have not occurred and may in fact never occur.”