How Plagiarized Animations Sold by Epic Marred a Promising Souls-Like's Launch

New Stories
1

Over the weekend, the recently released indie Souls-like, Bleak Faith: Forsaken, was accused of having stolen a set of attack animations from Elden Ring. 

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7b45m/how-plagiarized-animations-sold-by-epic-marred-a-promising-souls-likes-launch
2

FilmCow, the guy behind Charlie the Unicorn, did his own investigative dive into this earlier in the year but for audio assets.

I’m going to go against the grain and say I believe Epic and other asset stores like Unity and itch.io are correct in that they cannot realistically moderate this content.

Using the article as an example how many people here would have recognized that those animations were stolen if not put up side by side? This same exact thing has happened to Valve multiple times in CSGO with gun skins.

The realistic answer IMO is you need to judge the seller like you would on any other online store. How long have they been around? Do they have proof of WIP? Who’s vouching for them?

Rens article suggests all of this falls on the store fronts but without any sort of suggestion as to what these store fronts could be doing better other than this shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.

So here’s where I see this going:

  • You become super strict with who is allowed to post assets on your store which in turn stifles any small studio or independent from getting a chance in the same way XBLA was starting out

  • You staff up with moderators who honestly have no idea WTF they’re even looking at or how to even reliably tell something is stolen except by just recognizing something along with custom in house tools that probably have a high false positive rate

  • You start a vetted program and those creator’s/studios get a good star next to their name but then you end up with the Amazon Prime effect of no one buying from someone who isn’t vetted leading back to the first point

  • You start a community bounty program to identify stolen work which will surely not lead to drama, false accusations, and ruined careers

  • You add a fuzzy hash checking process on files because that’s worked out really well for YouTube

I don’t want to side with Epic but I legitimately do not see a solution to this problem. All of the digital asset shops have this issue and if there was a solution I’m sure they would implement it as a selling point for why you should buy from them.

4 Likes