A lawsuit that began in 2021 has now reached its conclusion. The MMORPG company Webzen must pay a large multi-million fine to publisher NCsoft and permanently take a game offline.
What led to the lawsuit and which game is involved? The court case revolved around the MMORPG R2 Mobile (R2M) from the South Korean company Webzen (MU Online, Metin 2), which was released in 2020 for Android and iOS devices.
In their lawsuit, the representatives of publisher NCsoft (Guild Wars 2, Aion, Blade & Soul) stated that R2M is a blatant copy of their own mobile title Lineage M. They argued that Webzen’s game was not only visually reminiscent of the Lineage spinoff but also in terms of systems, mechanics, and loot drop rates.
In August 2023, MeinMMO reported that NCsoft won the initial lawsuit. At that time, the defendants indicated they intended to appeal. Ultimately, the case reached the Supreme Court of Seoul, which delivered its final verdict on March 27, 2025.
Throne and Liberty also comes from NCsoft:
Heavy fine but also high revenue
What is the ruling of the Supreme Court? As businesskorea.co.kr reports, the court again ruled in favor of NCsoft. According to the verdict, Webzen did not infringe the publisher’s copyright but gained an advantage through unfair competition.
Webzen must
- take R2 Mobile offline and may not promote, advertise, reproduce, distribute, transmit or adapt it in the future
- pay a fine of 16.9 billion Won to NCsoft, which is about 10.1 million Euros
- cover 60 percent of the legal costs
After the initial defeat in court, Webzen would have only had to pay a fine of 1 billion Won (just over 632,000 Euros). NCsoft, on the other hand, would have liked to receive 60 billion Won from the defendant.
Also noteworthy: the current amount of 16.1 billion Won is said to be the highest fine ever imposed in a copyright dispute within the gaming industry at a South Korean court.
According to the ruling, the 16.1 billion Won is said to represent exactly 10 percent of the total revenue that Webzen has earned with R2M over the years. This partly explains why Webzen does not want to lose its mobile cash cow at any cost (it appears they also want to contest this ruling and file for an injunction to prevent the game’s shutdown).
On the other hand, the amount of the fine is not expected to cause Webzen financial problems or deter them from doing something similar in the future. Overall, the R2M project has proved to be financially worthwhile for the free-to-play provider. Therefore, other MMORPG providers are likely to continue risking being sued for copyright infringement. One game has been particularly imitated: 5 quirky games that actually copy World of Warcraft
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