Recently, Epic Games has sued Yash Gosai, who lives in Auckland, New Zealand, for creating V-bucks for their popular title Fortnite: Battle Royale. While this is the first gamer to purportedly create in-game currency for their title, Epic Games has already successfully sued one fourteen-year-old cheater last year.
V-bucks are Fortnite's in-game currency and can be bought through an in-game store, starting at $9.99 for 100 V-bucks and up to $99.99 for 13,500 V-bucks. As Fortnite: Battle Royale is a free-to-play game, Gosai's cheats can be easily seen as a threat to their bottom line.
“On information and belief, Gosai developed an exploit for Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode that enables players to obtain V-bucks without paying for them. Gosai created and posted a video on YouTube to advertise, promote and demonstrate the exploit... [the] Defendant’s videos demonstrating the exploit infringe Epic’s copyrights in Fortnite by copying, reproducing, preparing derivative works from, and/or displaying Fortnite publicly without Epic’s permission.”With the aforementioned video subjected to a takedown notice on December 29th, 2017, Epic Games is also accusing Gosai of copyright infringement, breach of contract, and conversion. Epic seeks "injunctive relief and damages", and as Gosai is not 14, wants recompense and for the defendant to destroy all of his copies of Fortnite.
Quick Take
This is definitely an interesting scenario, and it's nice to see that Epic Games did not ruin a fourteen-year-old's life over video game cheats. However, an adult should (and does) know better. Personally, I think if you are stupid enough to use hacks you deserve a game ban and if you create and market cheats on top of that - damaging a game company's livelihood in the process - I am completely on the side of Epic Games in this particular situation. Maybe this is a sign of things to come as cheating continues to evolve, but who knows. We'll let you know if it does.What do you think of this news? Do you think Epic Games is ethically or morally right to pursue their injunction? Let us know in the comments!
