No new release date yet. The next update from Bungie will be in the Fall. Quite frankly, I thought the game would just come out and die to cut their losses.
No new release date yet. The next update from Bungie will be in the Fall. Quite frankly, I thought the game would just come out and die to cut their losses.
Having to replace or pay for all the stolen art assets will do that…
The art isn’t even the biggest issue, the playtest was already reviewing poorly before everybody discovered the art was stolen.
Could it be that people just don’t want yet another fairly generic live service PvP extraction shooter? No, can’t be.
The stolen art is a much bigger problem for Bungie in a legal sense. They (and other studios) put out mediocre shit all the time and promise to fix it. I’m sure the poor play test contributed but the stolen art is likely the cause for this delay.
They now have to scan every single asset in the game to make sure the stolen art is no longer there and that’s just the stolen art they know about. There might be more stolen art in there, who knows.
Now that the controversy is public the original artist could easily find a lawyer to go against Bungie if more stolen art is found in the final release. If Bungie gets sued they might have to pull the game from storefronts.
I’m actually almost surprised they didn’t just pull it entirely after this. It’s not like it’s just one or two assets, the entire goddamn art style ripped off that artist.
to somewhat defend Bungie, you can’t own an art style. The person whose work Bungie ripped off has a case for the specific assets that are clearly her (I think the artist was a woman?) work. However assets that are inspired by her work but aren’t exactly her work is completely fair.
But that actually makes Bungies situation even worse because they don’t even know how many artists they might’ve ripped off. Could be just this one, could be five, could be a dozen. They don’t know. IMO serves them right because they clearly don’t learn from their mistakes.
Oh for sure, I get that. It’s not exactly something you can copyright. But when the entire art style heavily leverages stolen assets, that’s not a good look - I imagine they’re stuck redoing nearly everything from scratch just so they can be sure to remove anything that was stolen.
I have zero faith in anything Bungie does though until Pete Parsons bites the curb and the studio becomes developer-owned though so I’m sure something will slip through the cracks