Shark Tank India-Funded App ‘LOKA’ May Pose Copyright Infringement Concerns

American show Shark Tank expanded to India in 2021, giving local audiences a taste of business reality content featuring prominent business owners (also known as “sharks”) hearing investment pitches from local entrepreneurs. An Indian gaming and esports company Upthrust Esports made an appearance on the show earlier this year and it piqued our interest, so we went looking for other gaming, technology and esports organizations that might have made an appearance on the show. That is how we ended up discovering LOKA, a Metaverse app with some questionable elements that made us raise our eyebrows.

Metaverse App LOKA - Marred by Questionable Decisions?

LOKA is a metaverse app that was pitched on Shark Tank India last year by the app’s founder Krishnan Sunderarajan. It seeks to be a virtual hub where players can connect with each other in a virtual world similar to how Facebook first marketed its Metaverse experience. 

All five judges at Shark Tank India were impressed by Sunderarajan’s pitch and three of them pledged to invest in the app. They took a keen interest in the founder and his entrepreneurial skills. Surerarajan was seeking an investment of INR 40 Lakhs for 5% equity in his company. However, judges Peyush Bansal, Anupam Mittal and Aman Gupta closed a deal for 24% equity against the requested amount. 

Gupta, who is the co-founder of audio peripherals brand boAt Lifestyle, said during the final moments of the episode, “We are taking a bet with you even though you don’t have a business yet. I hope you establish it because we worked hard for our money.”

LOKA May Be Infringing on IPs Like PUBG, Free Fire, Valorant and Many More

After logging into the app, we were able to create an avatar but the game either kept crashing (on two different devices) or simply timed out when trying to connect to a server. We ended up logging into the web version of the app and were able to create our own lobby. 

While the performance and overall quality of the app can be overlooked because it is in beta, what stood out was that multiple avatars featured on the Heroes section of the app seem to have glaring similarities to popular characters from comics, other video games and cartoons. 

Some of them have the same names as their original counterparts while others seem to have their names slightly changed. For example, a character that looks identical to Superman is called S-Man in-game.

Here are all of the similar-looking characters we found in-game:

Here is a side-by-side comparison of some of the in-game models and their original counterparts:

From MLBB vs League of Legends to the sheer amount of Roblox games that feature seemingly plagiarized designs, there have been a lot of legal issues between publishers in the games industry. While the Roblox Corporation has taken action on some games and has well-defined policies to enable DMCA takedowns, we are only a quick search away from finding dozens of games that use “heavily inspired” designs from popular IPs like Naruto, One Piece, Marvel among many others.

At its core, LOKA is actually an interesting app that could do well in the Indian market. But its use of similar-looking characters from popular franchises raises potential questions about its ethics and business practices.

AFK Gaming reached out to some of the publishers whose characters are being used by the app and has also reached out to LOKA for comments. We will update this article should we receive a response.