The open world survival action game “Bleak Faith: Forsaken” produced by the independent game development team Archangel Studios has been accused of plagiarizing the actions of the animation “Eirden Ring” From Software. The development team responded by using materials purchased from the Epic Marketplace and promised to replace the action animation.
“Dark Faith: The Lonely Man”, which started fundraising in 2019, is a third-person perspective open-world survival action game. Players will become a member of Forsaken, enter the “Omnistructure” adventure of the unknown world, challenge dangerous creatures and BOSS, and reveal that period of history that has been forgotten by people. The work was officially launched a few days ago.
However, after the game was launched, it was revealed that the character’s actions in “Dark Faith: The Lonely Man” plagiarized character action animations in the well-known work “Eirden’s Ring”. Meowmaritus, a player who created the “Dark Souls” mod tool, even posted a comparison video on Twitter, stressing “I cannot tolerate someone using my software to directly export these animations and use them in commercial products .”
After the incident began, Tuan issued a statement on Monday that some animations in the game were accused of plagiarizing assets from other games. “We’ve been very transparent about purchasing some game-ready assets from the Epic Marketplace. As a three-person studio, using the Epic Marketplace has accelerated our development schedule, with only about 10% of r content is outsourced. The development team explained : “We bought these assets from Epic Marketplace and we believe that Epic, like all marketplace sellers, has been vetted before selling assets. Although we cannot judge, given that the seller has passed all checks, we are not aware of any breach.”
At the same time as this statement was published, the team has also contacted Epic, and today the team updated the response received from Epic: “According to the Marketplace profit sharing agreement, each Marketplace seller declares and warrant to Epic that they own the uploaded. content. Appropriate rights. However, like any store that submits third-party content, Epic cannot independently verify such rights, and Epic does not provide such securities with purchases.”
In response to Epic’s reply, the development team stated that, therefore, Epic cannot basically check the copyright of animations purchased through their store. Although the team was not happy with this response, they decided to replace assets bought in the store in the next few days; some fixes have been made in a recent update, with more to come. “This is a huge lesson for us, and I hope other indie game creators listen to it,” the team said.
Finally, the team once again thanks everyone for reminding them of this issue and helping them improve the game’s content.
