Hi-Rez Studios, the developer of Paladins has been accused of copyright once again. This time the copyright claim comes from a splash art that the studio has released for their game Paladins Strike, which is a mobile release of their flagship game. The splash art in question features Paladins champion Lex in the foreground with a metropolis skyline in the background. Quite quickly a Paladins fan on Reddit compared the picture with Overwatch’s Lijiang Tower art and discovered that they were nearly identical.
Hi-Rez Studios responded almost immediately on the post by claiming that the art was made by a different studio without much oversight, and that they apparently copied the background from Overwatch. “This art was created by a overseas partner studio for paladins strike and had not much in the way of oversight in its content creation by anyone internally at Hi-Rez. We will be looking into this immediately.” The art director states, “moving forward we are well underway in a bit of a shift in how I plan to see our splash art executed to make things feel a little more unique to paladins that should hopefully allow us to control content creation better with a larger quality of output to boot”.
This is not the first time that these issues have occurred between the two games. The games are quite similar in terms of gameplay and many fans of the games have argued about who copies who. When Blizzard revealed their newest hero Brigitte, Hi-Rez studios president Stew Chisam, claimed that Brigitte was a copy of an already existing Paladins hero called Ash.
Quick poll: If I happened to notice and point out any similarities between these two characters, would that make me the Pot calling the Kettle black, or the Kettle calling the Pot black? This will keep me up tonight unless I get a clear answer. pic.twitter.com/rt9j3NT0S0
— HiRezStew (@schisam) March 1, 2018
Issues between the two games do exist in the fan bases but is barely noticeable between the two companies. The fast reply of Hi-Rez studios does make it seem that they had no intention of blatantly copying the Overwatch art. Although they claimed that it was not their fault, it is definitely their responsibility to make sure that art created by other studios is up to par with the art thatthey release and they have to ensure that it’s not plagiarized.
