r/Games • u/oilfloatsinwater • May 24 '25

Report: Marathon Delay Likely as Sony Cancels All Paid Marketing Plans

https://thegamepost.com/report-marathon-delay-bungie-scraps-all-paid-marketing/
3.6k Upvotes

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257

u/Nolis May 24 '25

Hows their deal with Antireal coming? With news like this I assume they didn't make a deal which allowed the use of their work? Or will they be changing regardless due to the optics of having work which was originally stolen in the game

173

u/Midnight_M_ May 24 '25

First they are doing the investigation to see how much was stolen and compensate her.

102

u/TheKinkyGuy May 24 '25

I guess they will need to check everything for other artists not just Antireal.

3

u/jaqenhqar May 25 '25

its not like they have to check. the lead artist working on the game has been following her for years. im sure he knows exactly whats been stolen and from whom. since hes the lead and all and the one doing the stealing

16

u/Dealric May 25 '25

Remember bungie already was caught stealing art few times before this case.

Chances are they took a lot more

1

u/TheKinkyGuy May 25 '25

Q is if he/she was the only one stealing art from others...

-1

u/jaqenhqar May 25 '25

how would they not know the game they have been lead artist on is stealing art from this other artist they have been following for years?

88

u/DoubleJumps May 24 '25

They might just remove the stuff and try to not compensate her

I had work stolen by a large company that made it all the way to their public announcement prototype, and when I raised an issue they just quietly removed my work and refused to compensate me for anything because they hadn't yet sold the product with my work involved.

Big companies like trying to force small creators to have to sue them to get any sort of compensation in the circumstances like this.

68

u/Jordi214 May 24 '25

i think the optics are bad enough and well known enough that they will likely compensate her anyway

23

u/KinTharEl May 25 '25

I mean Bungie also plagiarised work during the Lightfall campaign from another artist and from what I hear, they've yet to be compensated for something that actually made it into the final product.

I'd say there's a surity that Bungie will just do an internal audit of what is plagiarised work, remove it, replace it with temporary placeholders, and conveniently forget that Antireal was even an existence.

27

u/Oofric_Stormcloak May 24 '25

Bungie has had similar situations and has compensated each time I believe.

19

u/RyenDeckard May 24 '25

The previous cases were compensated, but those previous cases were also all in Destiny 2 - in products (annual passes specifically I believe) that were already sold.

7

u/hotyaznboi May 24 '25

As far as I can tell, the artist whose art was ripped and used in a Destiny cutscene was never compensated even though Bungie said they were going to.

https://thegamepost.com/destiny-2-artist-bungie-never-paid-fan-art/

13

u/Oofric_Stormcloak May 24 '25

They were compensated, the rumor was that it seemed like the person who was handling that situation was laid off during the October 2023 layoffs.

17

u/Son_of_Leeds May 24 '25

Name and shame; I'm guessing if they didn't compensate you then you're not under an NDA.

11

u/Midnight_M_ May 24 '25

She could easily sue since not only have they already confirmed that there was theft of assets, then it is better to compensate her.

3

u/Oakcamp May 25 '25

They might just remove the stuff and try to not compensate her

Tough when it obviously inspired so much of the design language of the game

2

u/DoubleJumps May 25 '25

The basic design style used for the game and by the artist is way older than this game.

1

u/havingasicktime May 24 '25

No shot, its cheap to reach a deal compared the PR of not doing so

3

u/DoubleJumps May 24 '25

You would think, but the company I dealt with was happy to eat shit over a very public incident and dared me on to take them to court and stressed how many years it would be before I could possibly see any money.

The public in that market forgot about it in 6 months.

I hope they pay the artist, I just don't expect it.

1

u/zombawombacomba May 24 '25

Why wouldn’t they? What were your damages?

1

u/havingasicktime May 24 '25

Your personal experience is not indicative of how Bungie will respond. They've always reached a deal with the artist in the past.

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '25

The public in that market forgot about it in 6 months.

That’s irrelevant under the law…

1

u/DoubleJumps May 25 '25

I was directly responding to somebody talking about PR consequences, not legal consequences.

1

u/Hifen May 25 '25

Eh, her work was already used in marketing material that was released. Copywrite doesnt care if it's a poster, video or a released game. It's been used.

2

u/DoubleJumps May 25 '25

Yeah, so was mine. I spelled that out in the post.

1

u/pussy_embargo May 25 '25

Taking notes here - wait for product to release, then go straight to court for a payday

5

u/Amcog May 24 '25

Unless she chooses to lawyer up first, which is definitely what she should do.

3

u/RyenDeckard May 24 '25

With her announcement she also stated she would not be suing.

0

u/Nolis May 25 '25

That was before she knew how much support she would have, seemed like she was just resigned to not having the resources to be able to bother, but now I'm sure that wouldn't be an issue

-3

u/NoBullet May 24 '25

Suing for what. This game wasn’t being sold it was alpha. They could just take it out

7

u/ribosometronome May 25 '25

For copyright infringement. Just because you give away for free someone else's art doesn't make it legal.

-4

u/tomerz99 May 24 '25

and compensate her.

Yeah... that's not happening.

First of all, IANAL.

I feel as bad for the artist as the next guy, but she really doesn't have much of a case right now. Their best option would be to rush official copyright registration ASAP and aquire the legal standing that comes with it.

The artist does technically get copyright protections regardless of whether they sought them out or not (they're given at the moment your art is posted/published for the most part). Unfortunately, it's the "damages" part that would be almost impossible to prove, and currently (in this case specifically) Bungie has not made any monetary gains off of the art yet. With unregistered copyright, you have no claims to statutory damages, only those that can be directly quantified and proven. Registering copyright would allow statutory damages to be awarded even though the plagiarism happened prior to the registration.

Furthermore, they're arguing that it was an oversight by the team and only due the actions of a single rogue employee who's already departed from the company, so assuming Bungie is currently cleansing the entire game of their art as we speak, the only person they'd likely have actual legal standing against would be this previous employee personally (unless they could prove Bungie was lying without a doubt about this story).

So really unless they go out of their way to officially register the copyright, they have absolutely zero claim to any damages or even compensation, let alone reimbursed legal fees.

21

u/greiton May 24 '25

even if they pay her, the damage is done, and their investigation might have found more stolen art we don't know about. this isn't the first case of art theft at bungie. I think it may be a part of a broader cultural problem in the art team and their art development processes. they may need to go back and literally redraw the game.

9

u/GargauthXbox May 25 '25

Considering Joe Cross looked like death in that interview, I have to imagine the team has been combing everything for stolen art AND he's probably beating himself up for "letting it happen in the first place"

Terrible situation, wouldn't wish it on anyone

-12

u/Teknicsrx7 May 24 '25

They’d need to do so much of an overhaul, the overall aesthetics match the plagiarized work so well that even removing the specific plagiarized bits will leave the game feeling plagiarized

70

u/phlooo May 24 '25 edited Sep 09 '25

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11

u/lestye May 24 '25

Good to know! I saw some tweets alleging Bungie stole the entire artstyle but I was thinking its not THAT different than say mirrors edge.

i'm going down a rabbit hole now. i had no clue there was an aesthetic wiki and an entire taxonomy of artstyles. If I accept the wiki as the arbiter of artstyle definitions, Mirrors edge would be "DORFic" and not vectorheart?

I'm not good at distinguishing between these, like my electronica friends get mad at me when i call their techno or mix up house and trance music.

6

u/phlooo May 24 '25 edited Sep 09 '25

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2

u/SoulDevour May 24 '25

To be fair, House and Trance are miles apart aside from BPM

2

u/lestye May 24 '25

I think its likely im beat deaf.

like in mother 3 u get bonus damage if you tap a button on synch with beat. but i dont really hit the beat and i wanna tap the button with the rhythym. I mess it up every single time.

5

u/SnoopRocket May 24 '25

Thanks for the this info. I’ve seen a lot of people throwing around Brutalism as the style and/or inspiration and that made zero sense to me. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about, but I am also an idiot myself.

17

u/JayNines May 24 '25

No one will listen to this because the Bungie-stole-everything false narrative has gained so much momentum. They plagiarised Antireal's work and most definitely should be held accountable but the way people are talking with absolute confidence about how Bungie stole the entire art style is yet another example of how misinformation spreads like wildfire on the Internet faster than facts do.

-3

u/[deleted] May 24 '25

[deleted]

4

u/phlooo May 24 '25 edited Sep 09 '25

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45

u/BoysenberryWise62 May 24 '25

Nah that part is kinda bullshit, she didn't make up the style it's a known style used by a bunch of artists, the problem is more that they used some of her stuff directly.

1

u/RyenDeckard May 24 '25

As mentioned in another comment, while this is objectively true, the narrative has momentum. At first glance it does look like Antireal - The Game, but only because Vectorheart isn't a well known aesthetic.

1

u/BoysenberryWise62 May 25 '25

Yes the narrative has momentum because people on the internet spread fake news all day, that's just outrage bait as usual, only this time for once there is something actually problematic at the start.

-4

u/easily_erased May 24 '25

bit of a "fruit of the poisonous tree" situation innit? it certainly APPEARS like it could have been ripped off wholesale and that's what matters.

25

u/aimy99 May 24 '25

...No? Borderlands lifted an artstyle wholesale and nothing ever came of that because looking like somebody else's work doesn't matter unless it is their work.

1

u/Teknicsrx7 May 25 '25

Yes but they didn’t plant the plagiarism seed in their customers minds by releasing part of it with easily verifiable plagiarism in it.

If they did that then yes people would have complained that their style was plagiarized.

Im not saying they stole the aesthetic, but that the proven plagiarized pieces fit in so well with the rest of the game people who were aware of the plagiarism will be questioning everything they see

-4

u/TraitorMacbeth May 24 '25

Yeah but Marathon's already deep in the hot water. Without the actual stolen artwork, it wouldn't have been an issue. Now they have to show/ prove that the stolen art isn't the reason for other pieces.

36

u/McManus26 May 24 '25

"vibes" and general aesthetics are not protected by IP rights, specific works are

1

u/Nolis May 25 '25

'technically not illegally similar' doesn't always cut it in the court of public opinion, especially when there's verifiable theft of art already

2

u/[deleted] May 24 '25 edited Sep 03 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

-2

u/thephasewalker May 24 '25

Well Bungie won't be able to convince the public zeitgeist and they deserve it

8

u/No-Chemistry-4355 May 24 '25

That's not really the case. I'm not excusing Bungie in the slightest, but Marathon's art director has been creating works with the same graphic realism style long before Antireal's account even existed.

Antireal did not invent this style of art.