Bungie’s lawsuit against Destiny 2 cheaters has proved fruitful after months of back-and-forth, with the original Halo developers taking home $4.3 million.
AimJunkies and Phoenix Digital were originally struck with a copyright infringement (alongside other charges) after designing and selling cheats for Destiny 2, however, their attempts to countersue were ultimately unsuccessful.
Bungie’s victory was celebrated via the Destiny Bulletin Twitter account on Feb. 21, 2023. The post shared that, “Bungie has won a $4.3 million award against a #Destiny2 cheat seller AimJunkies in arbitration.”
The original statement of claim shared that AimJunkies and other cheat designers had infringed upon Bungie’s licensing agreement, by creating cheats without permission.
The claim read: “Defendants are infringing Bungie’s copyrights and trademarks, circumventing technological measures protecting access to Destiny 2, and breaching and inducing other players to breach Bungie’s Limited Software License Agreement.”
Prior to their win, the Destiny 2 devs were hit with a countersuit from AimJunkies and Phoenix Digital. The cheat developers claimed Bungie accessed their PCs without permission, which ironically was similar reasoning for the game developer’s original lawsuit. The countersuit relied on Bungie’s (at the time) new terms of service. The previous agreement didn’t allow the devs to access the PCs of suspected hackers, whereas the new one did. The transition to the new terms was used as a loophole during their countersuit.
Bungie allegedly accessed the PCs of an alleged third-party cheat developer, James May, and the three managing members of Phoenix Digital.
However, this argument fell through, leading to Bungie’s success.
