League of Legends dev Riot Games resolves legal dispute with Mobile Legends dev MOONTON after reaching agreement on global settlement

Riot Games and Moonton Games have been in a long-running copyright infringement battle over their flagship titles that began in 2017.

Anna Bernardo
·Contributor
Updated ·2-min read
Riot Games and MOONTON have been in a long-standing intellectual property dispute since 2017. (Photo: Riot Games, MOONTON)
Riot Games and MOONTON have been in a long-standing intellectual property dispute since 2017. (Photo: Riot Games, MOONTON)

Riot Games, the developer of popular games such as League of Legends (LoL), LoL: Wild Rift, Teamfight Tactics, VALORANT, and others, has formally dropped all of its long-running lawsuit against ByteDance Ltd's Shanghai Moonton Technology Co. over an intellectual property dispute involving MOONTON’s Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB).

In a press release by MOONTON on Tuesday (2 April), the MLBB developer said that both parties have “reached a global settlement on their intellectual property disputes” after several rounds of communication.

Both parties have officially signed a settlement agreement recently and Riot Games decided to formally withdraw the related lawsuits.

Details of the settlement were not made known at press time.

Riot and MOONTON have been in a long-running copyright infringement battle that began in 2017, when Riot sued MOONTON in the United States, alleging LoL copyright infringement, only to have the case dismissed as forum non conveniens (a legal term that meant that the case would be better heard in another jurisdiction).

Then, in 2018, Tencent Holdings, Riot's parent company, won a lawsuit against MOONTON co-founder Xu Zhenhua, who has since left the company. The non-disclosure and non-compete lawsuit was against Xu for US$2.9 million, not against MOONTON Games as a whole.

This was followed by another lawsuit filed by Riot in May 2022 in the Central District of California, alleging that the MLBB developer kept copying content and even promotional material from LoL and its other spinoff games for MLBB.

The said lawsuit was dismissed in November of the same year, with the Los Angeles Federal court citing a forum non-conveniens, stating that the dispute should be settled in China, where Tencent Holdings, Riot’s parent company, is based.

When contacted, the LoL developer told Yahoo Southeast Asia that they had nothing further to add to MOONTON’s statement.

Anna is a freelance writer and photographer. She is a gamer who loves RPGs and platformers, and is a League of Legends geek. She's also a food enthusiast who loves a good cup of black coffee.

For more gaming news updates, visit https://yhoo.it/YahooGamingSEA. Also follow us on Twitter, as well as our Gaming channel on YouTube, and check out Yahoo Esports Southeast Asia’s Facebook page!

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