Ex-Bungie artist plagiarizes art for marathon (Up: Bungie confirm, offer to do right by the original artist)

I'm curious how this happens. Because surely someone didn't set out thinking they'd get away with it?

Did they see the designs years ago, and it was a subconscious/accidental pull? The design is unique and specific, but I don't have the mind of an artist who can probably memory bank stuff like an instinct; maybe it was an honest mistake.

Did they know it was a rip off but convinced themselves they put their own spin on it?
 
StreetsofBeige said:
I dont think gamers who like the game or are core Bungie gamers will even care much at all about the plagiarism debacle.

But if the game does release so it's in the spotlight more, this game will get laughed at like Concord to the nines. Concord laughs faded away when the game and studio did.

So if Sony/Bungie want to release and support the game for years like any other shooter, they better be ready for ridicule for years. And because the issue involves plagiarism which is something on a personal level as opposed to a game being forgotten due to bad netcode or crashes, the laughs will be aimed at Bungie people directly.

Similar to Concord. Game's character art got laughed at coming from DEI loving employees.
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I am sure Sony/Bungie wants to support it for a long time, but just like Rocksteady and their Suicide Squad, when you see 137 players on steam, you say fuck this, and cut the cord. They'll stretch this disaster for a year, lose soooooo much money while doing so, but at least it won't look as bad as shutting the game within a week. Just imagine if they do shut it down Concord style. Who is gonna trust a single gaas title from Sony? Literally nobody sane, even the casuals on twitter will be aware of what they've been doing. This is why i don't think they can close down shop before 12 months of suffering.

After Marathon, Sony will absorb the company, and Bungie is no longer. This is 100% guaranteed at this point. I say nothing lost. Their last proper Bungie quality title was Reach, and that has been over 10 years ago.
 
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Shubh_C63 said:
So Firewalk failed, Bungie is failing, and Haven is about to fail.
dear lord Sony.
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you can add Naughty Dog's Intergalactic premier had disastrous reception and Insomniac's Wolverine game leak.

Just one disaster after another for Sony games. Goes to show lack of direction and leadership in their content department. All point to Jim Ryan and Herman Hulst
 
Grildon Tundy said:
I'm curious how this happens. Because surely someone didn't set out thinking they'd get away with it?

Did they see the designs years ago, and it was a subconscious/accidental pull? The design is unique and specific, but I don't have the mind of an artist who can probably memory bank stuff like an instinct; maybe it was an honest mistake.

Did they know it was a rip off but convinced themselves they put their own spin on it?
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Going by what happened, it seems the claim is one former coworker followed the creator and stole ideas. They submitted the art in 2020 and nobody noticed it was leached off someone else.

I dont work in gaming, but I'm going to assume when people submit art, everyone trusts it's genuine. I dont get a feeling work is scrutinized not trusting anyone and you got teams of people double checking doing google image search. But who knows.

Regardless, the entire situation is fishy as hell as there were other Bungie people who also followed that creator, including the Art Director himself.

So unless everyone except that one bad apple can prove they never saw or checked that creator's site (which could be a fair excuse since just because someone subs to a 100 YT channels doesnt mean they watch all of them all the time), it still seems like a situation where there's smoke there's fire. And the chances of multiple Bungie art people purposely leaching art and hoping nobody notices is definitely possible.

But Bungie has quickly already stated two things:

1. They admit someone stole the art
2. But, it was only one person. Not any other employees

It'll be interesting what the final fall out is.
 
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The funny thing about the Bungie stream was the moustache guy on left has a yellow poster behind him. At the bottom it shows 28.

That kind of artwork is one of the things stolen from Antireal from years ago. So despite them doing an apology in the first 5 minutes, they didnt even bother changing the poster.

Goes to show how much effort and scrutiny they give about the situation. They could had just covered up the yellow part. Nope.
 
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Grildon Tundy said:
I'm curious how this happens. Because surely someone didn't set out thinking they'd get away with it?

Did they see the designs years ago, and it was a subconscious/accidental pull? The design is unique and specific, but I don't have the mind of an artist who can probably memory bank stuff like an instinct; maybe it was an honest mistake.

Did they know it was a rip off but convinced themselves they put their own spin on it?
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I haven't read the whole thread but I think it's possible that these images were pasted in as placeholders by someone who intended to replace them with something similar down the line. But then that person left the company before that happened and either it wasn't effectively communicated or even that people were informed but for whatever reason it never got to the top of the to-do list.

I'm not saying it's ok that it got to this stage, but companies use placeholders for all sorts of things, all the time.

As I've said though, I hope this artist gets a giant payday for this.
 
I still think this game will be adjusted and release. Similar to everyone laughing at Concord in the summer, they still launched it. But for those of you who think it might be delayed or even outright cancelled, I actually wouldnt be surprised.

This game has too much bad coverage with plagiarism and them even admitting it, that everyone is going to keep up the ragging on the game all year till it launches.

Skimming big gamer streamers on YT (you can search yourself), lots of them already caught on the story criticizing Bungie. And like Concord, a lot of them will keep doing it every week.



 
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Having your art stolen is sadly nothing new, because it's very easy to avoid serious legal trouble if caught. Worse case you'll have to apologize (which will be forgotten very quickly) and maybe pay a small settlement. Artists are usually not very wealthy and they won't take a big corpo to court.
 
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Grildon Tundy said:
I'm curious how this happens. Because surely someone didn't set out thinking they'd get away with it?

Did they see the designs years ago, and it was a subconscious/accidental pull? The design is unique and specific, but I don't have the mind of an artist who can probably memory bank stuff like an instinct; maybe it was an honest mistake.

Did they know it was a rip off but convinced themselves they put their own spin on it?
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How can it be an honest mistake lol when in some instances they took word for word logos and designs. They didnt use the same design philosophy but wrote their own word or sentence. They ripped the exact logo and color and font and word. Its blatant plagiarism. Theres no spin on it, its the exact same art style and wording. Which part of this is their "spin on it"

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Mr Reasonable said:
As I've said though, I hope this artist gets a giant payday for this.
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As long as she didnt communicate with them directly and never told them "its ok im just dissapointed, its not about the money", then she can sue them to be set for life. Otherwise they will use their big shot lawyers and use all that in court against her and pay her out like $5000 to shut up or they will counter sue her.
 
Neon Xenon said:
Honestly, the art direction was one of the few things that even got me interested in Marathon (2025) in the first place, and is one of the few things people praised after its reveal. Then it turns out the the artstyle was just straight-up stolen from an artist.

And that's without mentioning that this is the FOURTH occurrence of art theft at Bungie. What in the actual fuck is going on over there?

Even with any resolution on Bungie's part, by running a check over to Antireal or whatever, this is a permanent stain on Marathon (2025). I see a delay taking place, but a delay isn't going to fix the reputation this game has right now.
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confused-john-travolta.gif
 
I still can't believe this took 4 years for a few maps and 3 characters. Blows my mind.

On that stream they basically committed to overhauling the entire game, lighting and environment, a lot of mechanics and that's not even thinking about the modes, puzzles and other things they mention. Within 4 months. Not being funny but it really sounds like these people have scammed 5 years permanent employment from a 24 month project.
 
cormack12 said:
I still can't believe this took 4 years for a few maps and 3 characters. Blows my mind.

On that stream they basically committed to overhauling the entire game, lighting and environment, a lot of mechanics and that's not even thinking about the modes, puzzles and other things they mention. Within 4 months. Not being funny but it really sounds like these people have scammed 5 years permanent employment from a 24 month project.
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gonna get that Sony salary and bonus from the acquisition before bailing out
 
Outlier said:
The Stream was a humiliation ritual for him.
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Honestly they should've protected this guy from that livestream. What they did with the stolen art is scummy but this guy got assblasted for an hour and the camera didn't pan away from this face once during the 60 minute stream. There was no reason to let that guy get abused for an hour.

They should've either delayed a day or week to get their streaming setup in order or pre-record a statement and put it on X or something. This was just an all-around bad experience for everyone.
 
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Feel really bad for the Artist.
This should never happen to people who put their heart and soul into such inspirational creations.
Must be so heart wrenchingly frustrating for them.
 
It almost sounds like Bungie's art team and leads took the infamous Picasso quote "good artists copy; great artists steals" in a quite literal way and chose to live by it. In a modern corporate sense, its often used as a erroneous, cynical and often greedy approach to do visual work. "Why bother trying to create something of your own when its too much work. Just nick somebody elses work out there and try to be as coy about it as possible". They're only sorry because they got caught. While Picasso actually did conceive unique visual concepts which were based on rough childrens doodles, following artists that came after have usually taken that quote out of context and exploited it in the worst and least imaginative way possible. Like the lowest barrier possible.

Apparently, Bungie is also being accused of nicking a storyline from some small time author. Seems like this is a cultural issue that runs deep within this studio. If true, look, I get worldbuilding and imaginating new ideas is tough, but FFS, I really don't get who in their right mind thought running the company this way was okay.

Honestly, it makes the more sense now as to why there was such a lack of newthink in the gameplay in combination with this radical visual aesthetic. The accompanied vibe combination felt weirdly uncomplementary and "off" in a way.

Bungie creative team - and this goes out to other AAA studios as well - need to become acquainted with a new quote they ought to reflect on: "great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil".
 
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SJRB said:
Honestly they should've protected this guy from that livestream. What they did with the stolen art is scummy but this guy got assblasted for an hour and the camera didn't pan away from this face once during the 60 minute stream. There was no reason to let that guy get abused for an hour.
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I agree, he could have said his statement then peaced out. It doesn't do the game any favors to have one of the devs looking miserable on camera for no good reason.
 
Hookshot said:
It was a panic buy following MS getting Bethesda and they would have been better off not doing it, because now their first party output is ruined and they get the games MS makes anyway.
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A lot of their player base are coming over here on the PC platform, that and those massive ass game budgets. I feel bad for Sony, they got finessed.
 
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Dorago said:
IP laws only matter if you have less money than the infringing party.

No major corporation or Asian country has even been financially ruined by blatant theft like this.

They should all be though.
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Huh? There are dozens of artists working on art for any given game. No company can control this, they simply trust the people they paid to do their actual job. It's not their fault if someone just copy pastas something. They can't be expected to scour the net to verify originality. Shitty workers are a thing. They get hired and don't do their job. In most cases they just make everyone else work harder to compensate, this is an example of that. Now legal needs to work harder to fix this.
 
It's pretty hard to claim, "it's just one guy, who just so happens not to work here" when multiple staff members were following the artist. Plus this isn't the first time they plagiarized art. The art director needs to be canned at this point.
 
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AeonGaidenRaiden said:
How can it be an honest mistake lol when in some instances they took word for word logos and designs. They didnt use the same design philosophy but wrote their own word or sentence. They ripped the exact logo and color and font and word. Its blatant plagiarism. Theres no spin on it, its the exact same art style and wording. Which part of this is their "spin on it"

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Lol, fair point.
 
KungFucius said:
Huh? There are dozens of artists working on art for any given game. No company can control this, they simply trust the people they paid to do their actual job. It's not their fault if someone just copy pastas something. They can't be expected to scour the net to verify originality. Shitty workers are a thing. They get hired and don't do their job. In most cases they just make everyone else work harder to compensate, this is an example of that. Now legal needs to work harder to fix this.
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There are plenty of tools that can do image search and comparison, especially now with modern AI capabilities.

They just can't be arsed to do it. Bungie got caught multiple times for this. It ain't a one off by a past employee but their internet culture basically.
 
SJRB said:
Honestly they should've protected this guy from that livestream. What they did with the stolen art is scummy but this guy got assblasted for an hour and the camera didn't pan away from this face once during the 60 minute stream. There was no reason to let that guy get abused for an hour.

They should've either delayed a day or week to get their streaming setup in order or pre-record a statement and put it on X or something. This was just an all-around bad experience for everyone.
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naw i love it let him rot.
 
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KungFucius said:
Huh? There are dozens of artists working on art for any given game. No company can control this, they simply trust the people they paid to do their actual job. It's not their fault if someone just copy pastas something. They can't be expected to scour the net to verify originality. Shitty workers are a thing. They get hired and don't do their job. In most cases they just make everyone else work harder to compensate, this is an example of that. Now legal needs to work harder to fix this.
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How about controlling what people the company hires?

You know, checking out their backgrounds, portfolio and so on. Shitty workers are a thing when there's shitty recruitment.

Call me crazy, but if I am going to hire an artist, writer or musician for a videogame I want somebody whose work aligns with the project. If you hire the first hack with pronouns that comes in, it's your fault.
 
Makes me wonder what sort of legal/licensing/ sign off department Sony's studios have (or haven't) because every studio I have ever worked at would have caught on to this way before the asset production stage.
Every mood board, Miro page or concept sketch should have any references clearly stated, so legal can do their thing

It's laughably amateurish really.
 
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cormack12 said:
I still can't believe this took 4 years for a few maps and 3 characters. Blows my mind.

On that stream they basically committed to overhauling the entire game, lighting and environment, a lot of mechanics and that's not even thinking about the modes, puzzles and other things they mention. Within 4 months. Not being funny but it really sounds like these people have scammed 5 years permanent employment from a 24 month project.
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yup. the way they talked about mechanics in this stream was as if you'd hear a dev talk about an early access project that isn't fully conceptualised yet.
they even talked about still having to get concepts in for how crafting and the in-game market works and how your inventory size should be balanced.

this doesn't sound like a game ready to launch in a few months, this sounds like a game that started development a year ago and is now in a somewhat playable state.

but even worse, it's clear the gunplay in the beta was so bad that they still have to try to assure people that the game will have proper skill expression... which I don't think is gonna happen as it seems to be obvious that they based their entire gunplay around having aim assist, as it's in fact even a weapon stat that you can improve with modification chips... and that's not gonna go over well with PC players.
 
Hookshot said:
It was a panic buy following MS getting Bethesda and they would have been better off not doing it, because now their first party output is ruined and they get the games MS makes anyway.
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It's not about who releases what where that's why Sony has gone multiplat as well, it's all about the revenue and owning multis assets on why these purchases happen and growing income.

The issue for Sony in my eyes they just pissed away $3.6b then the running costs since that point and a game that's going to be DoA and nothing else on the production line. So another 5 years until Destiny 3..?

I don't know what the plan is here, they can't shutter another company straight after Concord for the same thing.
 
SJRB said:
Honestly they should've protected this guy from that livestream. What they did with the stolen art is scummy but this guy got assblasted for an hour and the camera didn't pan away from this face once during the 60 minute stream. There was no reason to let that guy get abused for an hour.

They should've either delayed a day or week to get their streaming setup in order or pre-record a statement and put it on X or something. This was just an all-around bad experience for everyone.
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Agreed. I'm 42 minutes into this coverage of the stream, and it felt like more than an hour has passed. The start has a statement from the art director on the situation, and then there's talk about the state of the game after the Alpha Test, with occasional selected questions regarding the art. But the whole time, any talk about the gameplay just feels like attempts to direct the conversation away from the art scandal (which isn't going away any time soon). At that rate, why even run a stream instead of a video of the prepared statement? The response from Bungie has just been shitty, all-around.

...This damn game is less than five months away from launch in September (for now).

GymWolf said:
confused-john-travolta.gif
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This is GymWolf following Bungie's approach with Marathon 2025 by trying to copy a post he couldn't come up with himself.
 
Kotaro said:
you can add Naughty Dog's Intergalactic premier had disastrous reception and Insomniac's Wolverine game leak.

Just one disaster after another for Sony games. Goes to show lack of direction and leadership in their content department. All point to Jim Ryan and Herman Hulst
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So I know Playstation 5 is making Sony truck loads of money

But I keep sharing a story of when Jim was appointed head of SIE that Mike Ybarra and Phil Spencer shared a drink of Scotch (maybe Bourbon I don't recall anymore) that Ryan would "run Playstation into the ground" with how he handled studios

I also get the irony of Phil and Ybarra calling the kettle black with how Xbox has handled studios but thats also for another book but seems they were on to something
 
cormack12 said:
I still can't believe this took 4 years for a few maps and 3 characters. Blows my mind.

On that stream they basically committed to overhauling the entire game, lighting and environment, a lot of mechanics and that's not even thinking about the modes, puzzles and other things they mention. Within 4 months. Not being funny but it really sounds like these people have scammed 5 years permanent employment from a 24 month project.
Click to expand...

This situation is kinda getting to the parody level.

Taking this amount of years for near to zero content. This is like, the boss don't give a shit about what their workers are doing at work.
 
Neon Xenon said:
Agreed. I'm 42 minutes into this coverage of the stream, and it felt like more than an hour has passed. The start has a statement from the art director on the situation, and then there's talk about the state of the game after the Alpha Test, with occasional selected questions regarding the art. But the whole time, any talk about the gameplay just feels like attempts to direct the conversation away from the art scandal (which isn't going away any time soon). At that rate, why even run a stream instead of a video of the prepared statement? The response from Bungie has just been shitty, all-around.

...This damn game is less than five months away from launch in September (for now).



This is GymWolf following Bungie's approach with Marathon 2025 by trying to copy a post he couldn't come up with himself.
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Or maybe it's gymwof not reading every single post in the topic before posting, no offense but what you said offer that gif in a silver platter buddy :messenger_blowing_kiss:
 
Kotaro said:
you can add Naughty Dog's Intergalactic premier had disastrous reception and Insomniac's Wolverine game leak.

Just one disaster after another for Sony games. Goes to show lack of direction and leadership in their content department. All point to Jim Ryan and Herman Hulst
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For a few years (after Jim appointment) they were still riding on PS4 wave. That wave is over now and we see the full display of their failure to make compelling first party games.

They have gone full GAAS, full AAAA and full woke train, completely betraying the people who were actually buying their games.
 
HeisenbergFX4 said:
So I know Playstation 5 is making Sony truck loads of money

But I keep sharing a story of when Jim was appointed head of SIE that Mike Ybarra and Phil Spencer shared a drink of Scotch (maybe Bourbon I don't recall anymore) that Ryan would "run Playstation into the ground" with how he handled studios

I also get the irony of Phil and Ybarra calling the kettle black with how Xbox has handled studios but thats also for another book but seems they were on to something
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I always say too that the best leadership of a company is both short and long term focused.

There are levers you can pull to boost short term revenue. No doubt they are pulling those levers and it shows in the financial reports. But what happens when say PlayStation fans skip PS6 because "they'll jjust wait for the PC port"? This is not theoretical. It happened with Microsoft not that long ago. Shills claimed that people will still want Xbox for "reasons" but the Series X/S was a total disaster.

I still understand why Jim Ryan wanted to make live service games. he saw one of the biggest revenue contributors going to his primary competitor and felt he needed stuff in house. It makes sense. But they just didn't understand the challenge and totally fumbled it while also the singleplayer portfolio has fallen off. Even if you like games like Ragnarok, Spiderman 2, and Forbidden West, they're not as good as the prior ones, and the only significant Sony singleplayer game we've gotten the past 2 years is Astro Bot. Intergalactic looks really stupid. So, yea, short term and long term, you need both.
 
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If Playstation were a new brand entering the market, they would be pretty much dead by now. They are coasting on 3 factors: PS4 success, lack of competition and the massive adoption of digital libraries which makes it a tough decision to move to another platform.

It's nonsensical to give the Ryan Hulst duo any credit for not accomplishing the almost impossible task of sinking the biggest brand in videogames.
 
diffusionx said:
I always say too that the best leadership of a company is both short and long term focused.

There are levers you can pull to boost short term revenue. No doubt they are pulling those levers and it shows in the financial reports. But what happens when say PlayStation fans skip PS6 because "they'll jjust wait for the PC port"? This is not theoretical. It happened with Microsoft not that long ago. Shills claimed that people will still want Xbox for "reasons" but the Series X/S was a total disaster.

I still understand why Jim Ryan wanted to make live service games. he saw one of the biggest revenue contributors going to his primary competitor and felt he needed stuff in house. It makes sense. But they just didn't understand the challenge and totally fumbled it while also the singleplayer portfolio has fallen off. Even if you like games like Ragnarok, Spiderman 2, and Forbidden West, they're not as good as the prior ones, and the only significant Sony singleplayer game we've gotten the past 2 years is Astro Bot. Intergalactic looks really stupid. So, yea, short term and long term, you need both.
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I don't blame them for trying to strike it big with a GAAS game, one monster and you are rolling in cash for years

I have said this about Spencer about not being able to see a good game and the same goes for Jim in my eyes about looking at Concord or those other games that eventually were killed and for him to think "yeah gamers want this" is wild
 
HeisenbergFX4 said:
I don't blame them for trying to strike it big with a GAAS game, one monster and you are rolling in cash for years

I have said this about Spencer about not being able to see a good game and the same goes for Jim in my eyes about looking at Concord or those other games that eventually were killed and for him to think "yeah gamers want this" is wild
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Well, with every flop and cancellation the chances of a monster go down. They already got "lucky" with Helldivers 2 but that game is far from that DOTA/CS/Apex/COD/GTA tier and is likely never going to get there. It seems like they didnt have the infrastructure in place to build to that, either, which is another problem, and some say that is why they bought Bungie with their GAAS experience, but then look at Marathon...

Call me crazy but I dont see Horizon GAAS doing it either.
 
Seeing this whole thing really just reminded me how much Bungie is veering into just becoming modern Blizzard, mid to slop output.

However, another reminder that actually paid off is this drama reminded me how good Wipeout was, and checking PSN happened to see the Wipeout Omega Collection on sale for $8. I'll buy that instead of Marathon.
 
diffusionx said:
Well, with every flop and cancellation the chances of a monster go down. They already got "lucky" with Helldivers 2 but that game is far from that DOTA/CS/Apex/COD/GTA tier and is likely never going to get there. It seems like they didnt have the infrastructure in place to build to that, either, which is another problem, and some say that is why they bought Bungie with their GAAS experience, but then look at Marathon...

Call me crazy but I dont see Horizon GAAS doing it either.
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I recall that Bungie is also the company that was asked to "consult" on that The Last of Us Online multiplayer game, after which Naughty Dog decided to cancel it. Like yeah, I can get their experience with Destiny 2 (whatever that counted for at the time) is a reason they were brought along to advise, but the inertia from that $3.6 Billion deal is hitting a wall. You could probably say that it hit a wall much earlier.

A lot of the responses to Sony chasing after Live Service money can be summed up as "Yes, I understand why you attempted this to see the numbers go up, but a lot of this isn't fucking working."
 
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Angry_Megalodon said:
If Playstation were a new brand entering the market, they would be pretty much dead by now. They are coasting on 3 factors: PS4 success, lack of competition and the massive adoption of digital libraries which makes it a tough decision to move to another platform.

It's nonsensical to give the Ryan Hulst duo any credit for not accomplishing the almost impossible task of sinking the biggest brand in videogames.
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I really want to see the Ryan and Hulst worshippers come out of the woodwork now and find some usual mindboggling spin on this situation.
 
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Someone on the team had an inspiration folder and copied some stuff from it.

But it's just some fonts and logos right? Give the artist 500 bucks for it.
 
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