What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
It’s no secret that China is the home of cheap clones and various other rip-offs for
pretty much every product you can imagine, and video games are no exception.
The reason for this is simple; Chinese copyright laws are pretty much non-existent.
It’s very cash driven—as far as the Chinese are concerned, if you are making money then
you are doing good business, and copying intellectual property only becomes an issue if it affects
the state.
Since some of these League clones have 8 or 9 figure player bases, we figured it would
be pretty funny to dive into the world of bootleg games to look at some of the various
League of Legends rip-offs that exist, and which parts of the game they are most shamelessly
copying.
The first game we want to cover is called Magic Rush: Heroes, which isn’t actually
a MOBA game at all, but more like a combination between RPG and tower defense elements.
It’s developed by Shanghai Moonton with over 10 million Android installs, and is actually
currently in the middle of a lawsuit issued by Riot Games!
Although the game functions pretty differently from League of Legends, the main issue is
that the Shanghai Moonton team didn’t bother to develop their own characters—they simply
copied Riot’s champion designs, changed their names and called it a job done.
A good example of this is Magic Rush’s version of Lux, called ‘Karna.’
Not only is her appearance very similar, but even her abilities and ability icons are almost
carbon copies.
Instead of Final Spark, she has ‘Magic Flash’ which as you can probably guess is a big light
beam in a straight line.
On top of that, she packs a prison ability, an AoE slow and explosion, and some ally utility
too.
It’s not only the occasional character that shares their design with Riot’s champions
either, almost every character in Magic Rush has either extremely similar visual, extremely
similar mechanics or a combination of the two.
In fact, Shanghai Moonton even ‘reworked’ the visuals for a lot of their characters
in an attempt to differentiate them from the original designs; Lufia example, was changed
from being a very obvious Ashe clone to a more traditional elf archer design, although
her abilities are still pretty similar, featuring a Volley-esque ability and a long range single
target stun.
Still, the lawsuit hasn’t managed to take the game down yet, and if Shanghai Moonton
continues to rework their designs, they might just be able to evade shutting it down.
The next League clone we want to cover is 300 Heroes, which is one of the more commonly
known knock-offs after gaining a notorious reputation in the media.
Unlike Magic Rush, 300 Heroes is an actual MOBA game that plagiarizes even more elements
than just League champions.
The map you play on is an almost exact copy of Summoner’s Rift, and the UI is almost
identical to the old League one too.
A lot of the characters in 300 Heroes are copies of League champions too, but with a
bit of a strange twist.
For example, as videogamedunkey discovered while trying the game out, you can play as
a combination of Blitzcrank and Dr Mundo!
Except it’s it’s actually Shrek.
It seems like it’s the same story for every character; they plagiarize abilities from
a League of Legends champion, and then attempt to hide it by copying much loved characters
from different franchises.
For example, say you want to play some Lissandra—in that case, you better lock in Gaara from the
Naruto Universe.
Or perhaps you prefer playing some top lane Rumble; in which case you’d have to select
Wall-E instead.
The site appears to be offline now which suggests something has finally been done about this
particular copycat, but you the English speaking community is apparently trying to reverse
engineer it so that they can put up a private server to play on.
D10 is the next rip-off on our list, although to their credit they have seemingly attempted
to change up the characters slightly.
Going through the character list, you can see the they are all copies of either League
of Legends champions or characters from Blizzard.
However, the developer Duoyi has clearly gone to some length to not only change the artstyle,
but swap kits around so that they don’t actually play the same way as the LoL originals.
For example, the character using Lux’s appearance seems to function more like Soraka in the
trailer, and their version of Miss Fortune is more like a gender-swapped Lucian or potentially
Nova from the Starcraft franchise.
Aside from the characters, there are a lot of very other stolen elements.
For example, you can tell in the trailer that the map is the reworked Summoner’s Rift,
with the only major changes being to the type of monsters occupying jungle camps.
The sound effects are extremely similar too—this could be a coincidence, so we hesitate to
say they are copied directly from League, but they may have made them from scratch using
League’s sound FX as a foundation to build on.
As far as the in-game appearance goes, this one takes the cake for the most accurate LoL
clone we’ve seen so far.
Most players are aware by now that the Chinese company Tencent owns League of Legends, which
is part of what makes this next game so strange.
King of Glory is a Chinese MOBA for mobile devices, which has been one of the top grossing
iOS mobile games in China.
As with the other clones it features a ton of things ripped straight out of League.
The color palettes are identical, with the map texture and terrain being lifted straight
from League and then tweaked in very minor ways.
One example is the base designs; they are smaller and feature no inhibitors or nexus
towers, probably to make the game time shorter since it’s designed for mobile devices.
Everything else, from minions to champion mechanics, are almost exact copies as League’s
own designs, although they use different names and visual appearances.
We mentioned earlier that King of Glory was particularly strange for a clone, and that’s
down to the fact that it’s actually owned and developed by the same company that bought
League of Legends—Tencent!
It seems logical that they’d have the right to develop an official LoL mobile version,
but for whatever reason they simply opted to make a clone and change enough to get away
with it.
After all, they technically aren’t stealing IP, since they already own the original IP!
Our final game today is Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, another game by developer Shanghai Moonton.
As with the first game we covered, Magic Rush, this is another target of Riot’s lawsuits
over copyright infringement.
Although Magic Rush borrowed character design elements from League and simply put them in
a different genre of game, Mobile Legends is actually a MOBA game that is completely
based on League’s design.
On top of that, as with 300 Heroes, they copied characters from various gaming franchises,
featuring lovable champions such as Devil May Cry’s Nero, Warcraft’s Tyrande and
even Roadhog from Overwatch!
Originally, Shanghai Moonton copied characters quite directly.
For example, their version of Xin Zhao had the same visual appearance and kit, only he
was named Zhao Xin instead—not incredibly subtle.
Riot first addressed this claim by notifying Google and Apple in a bid to get the Mobile
Legends: 5v5 MOBA taken off the app stores, resulting in Moonton removing it from the
app stores without notice.
Before long, the game was back up on app stores as Mobile Legends: Bang Bang.
Looking at the current website, we can see that Shanghai Moonton has spent a fair bit
of time changing the character designs in a bid to escape the lawsuit, but whether they
will get away with it or not is anyone's guess.
There are still a lot of parallels between Mobile Legend and League of Legend champions—such
as Hayabusa and Zed for example—but this is China we’re talking about, so a lawsuit
over copyright infringement isn’t going
to happen easily.