In an interesting series of events, Microsoft has quietly removed two of the popular dance emotes from Forza Horizon 4 with a recent update. The developers behind Forza Horizon 4, Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios rolled out a new update for the game yesterday, which introduces new features while getting rid of the Floss and Carlton emotes, reports Polygon.
Emotes in games were made popular by Fortnite, and the developer of the game, Epic Games, is facing a couple of lawsuits for “stealing” the emotes. Both Floss and Carlton are wildly popular amongst kids, and as annoying as these dances are in real life, they have been a major factor leading to Fortnite’s success.
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So it’s no surprise that other games like Forza Horizon 4 are implementing similar ideas, with the title including other popular emotes like the Clown Dance, Chicken Dance, Best Mates, Drake’s Hotline Bling, etc., most of which are already on Fortnite.
Epic Games, however, has faced a bunch of lawsuits — one from Alfonso Ribeiro, who starred in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, creating the popular Carlton dance. The company is being sued by the Backpack Kid for the Floss dance, and rapper 2 Milly for the Milly Rock dance as well. Whether Epic Games will be fined remains to be seen, but let’s remember that not everyone is taking legal action against developers like Epic Games for “stealing” the dances. These emotes are just dances, and not every artist behind the dances seem to care much.
What’s going to happen to these lawsuits going forward remains a mystery, but Microsoft clearly doesn’t want to get involved here, and so removing the dances before any legal action is a pretty clever move from Microsoft.
provision l-3
<p>I think Microsoft might be overly cautious on this one. Neither Riberio or Horning (backpack kid) have trademarked their respective dances which makes the legal challenge an up hill battle. I believe Horning has since filed for a trademark but it hasn't been granted as of yet. </p>