Peak Games suing Hasbro for game cloning

Toys giant Hasbro is facing a lawsuit from Peak Games after the latter has claimed the latest My Little Pony game is a copy of one of its own titles.

Developed by Hasbro's Backflip Studios, My Little Pony: Puzzle Party launched on October 13th and is a colour-matching puzzle game for mobile devices - but Peak claims it is a clone of Toy Blast, a title originally released in August 2015.

VentureBeat reports the Turkish developer has filed a lawsuit with the US District Court in San Francisco, providing side-by-side images where the game's design, mechanics, function and even text is virtually identical.

The lawsuit even posits that the tutorials of both games follow the exact same step-by-step process, and that the only discernible difference between the two games is the My Little Pony branding.

If true, it would be surprising behaviour for Hasbro given that the firm sued a number of games firms for cloning Scrabble with releases such as Lexulous, Wordscraper and Scrabulous back in 2008.

"When the game was released last week, it was immediately obvious to all of us that this was just a reskin of Toy Blast," said Jennifer Kelly, the Fenwick & West partner representing Peak Games. "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."