Bungie has issued an official statement, they are throwing an artist under the bus and pledging to make it right with the original artist.
This is a developing story.
It’s definitely a really bad look, but I can imagine how it could have happened.
A former artist or even an outsourced artist probably delivered them a texture sheet of graphics, nobody caught that several of the graphics were plaigerized, the artist never mentioned it, assumed it was purely for a blockout or temporary, maybe they used it during a mood boarding/visual development stage and it got pushed along the pipeline.
Trying to reverse search graphics your artists make for you would probably not be done in the good faith sense, if there wasn’t suspicion that it wasn’t original anyways? But happening four times seems like a reason to really crack down on that kind of thing for the future … Bungies management has also constantly had issues too.
Artists use photobashing all the time to develop concepts since timelines push design work faster and faster. Photobashing other artists work is usually an issue but taking images or conepts within creative liberties through sufficient alteration or “transformative” use is typically the move if it was ever done.
I’d call it a management issue. Probably bad oversight of outsourcing, or maybe internally disorganized production. Also text and graphics seems like they’d probably have vetted the designs and someone really tried to pass it off without raising attention somehow … So I’m guessing outsourced and not an internal employee? Idk.
Is the BlueSky OP here not a native English speaker? Cause, BOY that was tough to follow.
Why did they have to copy anything?!
BUNGIE LITERALLY ALREADY MADE MARATHON
Yeah but that Marathon was innovative, looked good, and was fun to play. That would never work in this day and age. Also I think the only thing that same about the two is the name.
I played the original games, on a Performa 6100 Mac, back in the day!
They just trained their employees using other people’s copyrighted works. What’s the problem?
The implication that generative AI would spit out pixel-for-pixel copies from its training data is flat out wrong. Even generative AI would have made more original assets than what Bungie put in Marathon. The worst part is that this is like the 4th time they’ve been caught doing this.
Being inspired by an art style and using that style is fine, and completely normal. Thats how art works. But copying and pasting 1 for 1 is not fine.
I agree but it can get pretty close. Try asking gpt-4o to generate a realistic picture of an adventure who wears a hat and wields a whip to find lost treasure. It returns basically a picture of Harrison Ford
deleted by creator
There’s nothing wrong with inspiration (attribution is nice), but what’s evident is they straight up LIFTED parts of antireal’s art into in-game assets.
This is something Sam Altman would say
Bungie had similar problems with Destiny 2, if I remember correctly.
Bungie commented on the current issue an hour ago.
🎶 Oops I did it again! 🎶
🎶 I stole your art, added it to my game, ooh baby 🎶
How is Bungie still in business? I loved destiny but after a while of them being so hostile and anti-consumer I just left. Fuck Bungie and fuck whoever works for those ass hats
This will be entertaining in their ongoing Red War plagiarism lawsuit.
Should have just used AI, at least then people could debate whether or not it was plagiarism
Is anyone actually shocked about modern Bungie?
I just assume any art coming out of Bungie is stolen now.
Joseph Cross has probably never made any original artwork, it’s all just stolen from other people.
What art did they steal?
Turns out you can click the link and find out! It links to a very short Bluesky post! Try it out! Lemmy has more than just headlines!
I hear there’s this thing called a ‘hyperlink’ you can click to find out
