Board 8 > Bungie's Marathon seemingly stole a bunch of assets from an artist

(+) Yeah! (+)

Womp womp

https://x.com/4nt1r34l/status/1923067988871147605

Thats insane, and liners the middling response to the Alpha, what the hell is Bungie doing?

its even more blatant than it seems at first glance

notice on the right side you can see where they half-assedly erased the artists watermark (inside the black/red box, respectively)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/f/f5a0f11a.jpg

Is it really that difficult to just pay artists when you've got Bungie-level funding? It would be less than a rounding error on their budget.

I wonder if this is due to one incompetent/lazy person sneaking things through, or if it's an intentional choice by the team

Hopefully they fix this really quick and issue an apology.

What license was the art released under?

Marathon alpha? Are they remaking it?

azuarc posted...

Marathon alpha? Are they remaking it?

New Marathon game that is a PvPvE extraction shooter

banananor posted...

I wonder if this is due to one incompetent/lazy person sneaking things through, or if it's an intentional choice by the team

Hopefully they fix this really quick and issue an apology.

What license was the art released under?

Standard practice in these cases is they blame it on a rogue employee who was under pressure to deliver or whatever. Even though in reality, a dozen people probably reviewed this and could've caught the plagiarism.

foolm0r0n posted...

Standard practice in these cases is they blame it on a rogue employee who was under pressure to deliver or whatever. Even though in reality, a dozen people probably reviewed this and could've caught the plagiarism.

This is like the fourth time Bungie has gotten in trouble for something like this, and in all previous cases they blamed it on a contractor. They will almost certainly do the same here even though it's significantly more pervasive and foundational to the game's visual design here (plus like over a dozen bungie employees follow the artist in question and at least one of them surely should have recognized the work)

Is this artist particularly well known? I was wondering how it would be possible for other employees to catch the theft without knowing who the artist is. But, that excuse goes out the window if they did know the artist.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Thats insane, and liners the middling response to the Alpha, what the hell is Bungie doing?

I typed this up on my phone and have no idea what liners is autocorrected from lol.

They've got over 15k followers on twitter, including several people at Bungie, most notably the art director of the game

They're pinning it on a single artist again, but this time a "former Bungie artist" rather than a contractor

https://bsky.app/profile/marathonteam.bungie.net/post/3lpb36jqb5c22

WazzupGenius00 posted...

New Marathon game that is a PvPvE extraction shooter

Then what does it actually have in common with Marathon?

azuarc posted...

Then what does it actually have in common with Marathon?

It starts with an M and ends with an arathon.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

They're pinning it on a single artist again, but this time a "former Bungie artist" rather than a contractor

https://bsky.app/profile/marathonteam.bungie.net/post/3lpb36jqb5c22

Of course. That's the standard method for any kind of large company or organization unless they're caught with undeniable evidence showing otherwise.

Bungie's a zombie company that died years ago, is run by a scam artist who is looting the corpse, and looks like is STILL suffering from the awful crunch practices that killed it. Someone on the team probably took shortcuts to meet some absurd deadline,and no one else noticed because they either were struggling with deadlines of their own, burned out and quit before catching it, or were fired so the CEO could afford more luxury cars.

Dev stream going well

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/62cb0597.jpg

I just saw that too... apparently they were supposed to stream the game today, but can't because of all the stolen artwork. So instead they sent a couple guys out just to talk?? Seems like a bad idea

https://x.com/PaulTassi/status/1924468476594246049

It was also revealed that apparently Marathon needs to be in the top 5 NPD sales for the year to be considered a success by them

Concord 2

Bane_Of_Despair posted...

It was also revealed that apparently Marathon needs to be in the top 5 NPD sales for the year to be considered a success by them

How much you wanna bet it could be #5 and still be considered a failure and lead to the whole team being laid off