After Sony recently ending up being similarly shady with a Japanese promotional video, now No More Heroes 3 is a bit under fire.

First video’s No More Heroes 3’s trailer from The Game Awards. First, Studio Plumeau posted a comparison video on Twitter, which has been removed since. (You’ll see why later.) In it, the short animation effect that you can see on the game’s logo was compared with the Utrecht, The Netherlands-based studio’s work. The studio first thought it could be plagiarization, asking Nintendo of America’s, No More Heroes 3-developer Grasshopper Manufacture’s English, and publisher Marvelous Games’ Twitter account who he should send the bill to. You can see the animation in question at one minute, three seconds in this video.

Then, the studio got a question: „Can you provide more details on how you created the original animation – is it original frame by frame animation created by you? Not from an asset library?” The answer follows: „Hey, it’s a hand-drawn logo animation I made for my animation studio back in 2013, no library or assets from another source used. This happened to me before but not on this scale.”

It turns out the situation is different from what Sony had – the twist follows: „Update on the whole No More Heroes3 FX animation debacle. We have received word from the person in charge of the FX animation in the trailer. The animation was indeed purchased on Envato. The user was selling lots of different assets made by many other FX artists as well. Also, the user responsible was not Denis Kozionov (aka Denis Kozyon) he was already banned from Envato back in 2015 for copyright infringements.” Envato is a digital marketplace where artists can sell their assets, effects, and the like, and if someone sells work done by somebody else, they have to have the permission and necessary licenses to do so.

So Grasshopper, or the team responsible for the trailer, plagiarized unintentionally (!), and it is not their fault – they did not know the user had unauthorised sales of products, meaning it’s the seller who we need to blame here. (And the person mentioned by the studio, going by a quick Google search, is a Russian web designer. The person behind the sales this time is unknown – it could be someone from Thailand. This account was brought up by Studio Plumeau in a later tweet, claiming they sell stuff from them and other artists without permission.)

No More Heroes 3 is out on the Nintendo Switch next year… or not: Travis, the protagonist, jokingly claims „you wish!” at the end of the trailer.

Source: DualShockers

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