Marathon Maker’s Morale in Tatters as Art Director Forced to Admit Asset Theft in Ill-Conceived Livestream

It’s not been a good week for Marathon maker Bungie – but then it feels like we type out that sentence every couple of months anyway.

Forbes claims morale at the Washington-based outfit is in “free fall” after it was accused of plagiarising art assets earlier this week. To the studio’s credit, it responded rapidly, admitting its errors and outlining the steps it’s taking to rectify them.

That alone would be bad enough, but then the firm forged ahead with an ill-conceived livestream, where a visibly upset art director Joe Cross read out a statement while being berated by the chat.

“It came to our attention that an artist who worked on Marathon in the early stages of pre-production took a number of graphic elements from a graphic designer, without permission or acknowledgement, and placed them on a decal sheet that was then checked in, in 2020,” he said.

“The decal sheet included icons and text elements. These elements ended up in our alpha build and there is absolutely no excuse for this oversight, and we are working on, and 100% committed to, our review process to ensure instances like this don’t happen again on Marathon or at Bungie.”

The studio had been set to show more of Marathon gameplay during the livestream, but because it couldn’t guarantee any of the aforementioned offending assets would show up in the footage, it decided to postpone the showcase instead. Why wouldn’t you just cancel the entire livestream?!