As you may or may not have heard, video game publishing giant recently came under fire for what at least appeared to be blatant plagiarism when screen-shots for the browser-based game Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliance were revealed to be exact copies of tanks from Warhammer 40,000.
The watchers at reddit were quick to jump on the story, and numerous gaming publications followed suit. I wondered at the time how they'd spin the ugly on this one.
Turns out it was all a big misunderstanding, at least according to EA.
"Games Workshop and EA are aware of the IP issues around the artwork in question," EA said in a statement to GameSpot, "which have now been resolved. The artwork was internal EA concept art that was unintentionally released publicly. No Warhammer 40,000 tanks have ever made an appearance in Command and Conquer: Tiberium Alliances, and never will. Games Workshop and EA continue to have a strong relationship working together on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and the new free to play game Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes which just entered open beta."
The question is, would said concept art have reached the actual game itself had this scandal not gone public? And what on earth are concept artists at EA doing drawing up obvious knock-offs of other developers' work?
I suppose the reason this all rankles as bad as it does is this: if EA never planned to use the concept art in the game itself, why have it at all?
Why not just take a photo of the Warhammer tanks and say "Riff on this" and see what people came up with?
Concept art isn't designed just for fun – it's there to be used.
The whole thing is bizarre and puzzling, and gets right back to the question of broken trust between EA and fans.
Since this sort of thing is so easily uncovered by any fan of Warhammer with a close eye, it's almost as if EA just doesn't care.
That, or they still underestimate the internet.
Follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Read my Forbes blog here.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.
0 comments:
Post a Comment