Behaviour Interactive is shutting down Westworld Mobile following a lawsuit settlement with Bethesda. The Westworld-themed management game was released in the first half of 2018. Bethesda sued Warner Bros, the game’s publisher, and Behaviour Interactive for being a “blatant rip-off” of Fallout Shelter. A settlement was reached in the lawsuit earlier this month.
Announced on Twitter, Behaviour pulled the game from the App Store and Google Play on January 15, 2019. The game’s online servers will be closed on April 16, 2019, and in-game purchases are no longer available. The company made no mention of refunds for users who purchased content as recently as yesterday, drawing ire from the game’s community. The closure of Westworld Mobile follows an “amicable” resolution that came earlier this month to Bethesda’s lawsuit.
It remains unclear what the resolution exactly was, but it appears that the closure of Westworld Mobile is the final result. Bethesda filed suit against Warner Bros and Behaviour in June 2018. According to the lawsuit, Westworld Mobile used Bethesda’s intellectual property without authorization, and that the game ripped off Fallout Shelter.
Behaviour co-developed Fallout Shelter with Bethesda, releasing the game at E3 2015. Bethesda argued that gameplay in Westworld was substantially similar to that in Fallout Shelter and that both games shared remarkably similar designs, art, animations, and features.
A likely damning piece of evidence against Westworld Mobile was that the game had the same bugs as early builds of Fallout Shelter. Bethesda fixed that bug before shipping Fallout Shelter, but it appeared that Behaviour used the same code to develop Westworld.
The closure of Westworld Mobile was not brought up in the press release which announced the lawsuit’s settlement. The suit was also not brought up in Behaviour’s announcement of the game’s closure. It appeared that Westworld would continue to be available after the lawsuit was settled, but that is no longer the case. Warner Bros and Behaviour likely won’t be able to speak about the specifics of the case for some time, and it’s doubtful Bethesda will divulge more information regarding the mobile Westworld game.
