Bungie’s legal crusade against websites selling cheats for Destiny 2 has taken a weird turn. One of the sellers has claimed that its cheats have been helpful to the developer, not doing damage to its game.
Bungie’s legal tussle with cheat manufacturers has been going on for a while now. So far, it has sued at least three such offenders and has also joined hands with other developers like Riot and Ubisoft in doing so. Bungie also saw a certain degree of success when it was awarded $13.5 million in damages. However, one of the accused has retaliated in a rather unusual way.
AimJunkies.com, which is owned by Phoenix Digital Group, is one of the sellers Bungie sued. Interestingly, the accused claimed that Bungie actually benefited from its cheats. As reported by PC Gamer, a press release on the website read, "Bungie also claims that we caused grievous harm to their game when in fact some of their most popular months of player counts and sales were during the time AimJunkies offered their software products. We believe and intend to gather actionable proof of that and disprove another one of their wild assertions".
Bungie’s legal battle with AimJunkies hit a snag when a court dismissed Bungie’s claims suggesting the seller had an illegal copy of its code. However, the developer restated its claims saying AimJunkies had reverse engineered the code for the cheats. Now, AimJunkies has retaliated by saying Bungie is making cheating illegal because it failed to govern its own players. Additionally, it is also looking to sue the person who actually acquired cheats from it and sent it to an ‘unnamed company’ (Bungie). Where it gets utterly bizarre is that AimJunkies actually offered to work with Bungie to solve ‘multiple problems’.
This retaliation also comes right after a Bungie lawyer revealed that suing cheat makers is good business. No matter how absurd the claims by AimJunkies look, it could still be one of the reasons for the retaliation. Plus, the court refuting Bungie’s claims just seems to have emboldened the accused, which could’ve also been the catalyst for its pursuit of legal action.
This just proves that Bungie’s ‘war on cheat makers’ is far from over and there is still a long way to go to put an end to it completely.