Bungie wins $4.4 million legal battle with AimJunkies

AimJunkies, a cheat-selling service, has lost its nearly two-year-long legal battle against Destiny 2 developer Bungie.

The details:

• Bungie has been awarded a total of $4,396,222 USD following its successful ruling against a cheating service that allowed players to purchase Destiny 2 cheats. The award consists of $3.6 million in damages and $738,000 in legal fees.
• The cheat portal was found liable for "trafficking in circumvention devices," which essentially means that they sold and shipped cheats to players. James May (not to be confused with the British TV presenter) was behind the cheats. Despite multiple bans from Bungie, he continued to "bypass the bans and circumvent the protections Bungie had in place to prevent reverse engineering," in violation of Bungie's DMCA.
• Bungie claimed in 2021 that AimJunkies had violated its copyright by offering "Destiny 2 hacks" on its website. The court later dismissed this claim, with Bungie later reinstating its case and alleging that AimJunkies had reverse-engineered Destiny 2 and copied its code to create the cheats, causing "grievous harm" to the game.
• In November 2022, AimJunkies attempted to countersue Bungie, claiming that the developer had accessed a cheat maker’s computer without permission and downloaded their personal information. Both claims were dismissed by the judge after AimJunkies failed to provide evidence that the computer was "hacked" and that the documents Bungie had supposedly accessed were not copyrighted.

In other Bungie news:

• Last week, Destiny 2 game director Joe Blackburn released a blog post giving players a heads-up about what to expect from the upcoming Lightfall expansion, including updates to PvE and PvP, the return of more challenging gameplay, and other general gameplay changes. Lightfall will launch on February 28 across all major platforms.
• In January, Bungie creative lead Tom Farnsworth revealed that the studio would work alongside parent company Sony on "a number of unannounced projects." It’s speculated that one of the projects is "Matter," a rumored multiplayer title with a lighter tone than both Destiny and Halo, but there’s little to no information currently available.