Nexon’s looter-shooter (which was prone to crashing on PlayStation 5 the day after its release) is now in the awkward position of having apparently stolen from Bungie’s game.

Players were quick to notice that The First Descendant features icons that we’ve already seen in Destiny 2. Some are the same, and in other cases, they’ve been slightly modified. It seems that the free icons are from a site called Iconduck, but why would Bungie use artwork from a site like that? At first glance, the icon site says that it has nearly 274,000 freely available icons and illustrations that can be used for personal and commercial purposes, but many of them seem to have been lifted from other companies or games, and that’s no joke!

There are 204 icons in the Destiny Icon Collection that are open content under a Creative Commons license, ranging from the game’s logo to faction and weapon logos, and even the Xbox and Microsoft Windows logos show up. One of the editors must have been in a joking mood, because he called the Destiny icon set a bit unfamiliar. There are also Pokémon icons on the site that can be used for commercial purposes and projects, but this is understandably stupid, as The Pokémon Company, Game Freak and Nintendo are very strict about protecting their intellectual property!

I've come to hate open source. Most of the icons are ripped from the font files created by Bungie and its designers. Most of the remainder are designed by Bungie and recreated by me or whoever contributed them to that repo. I don't want @iamiconduck to use my work like this.

— Tom (Bray.tech) (@BraytechHelp) July 8, 2024

Tom Chapman, the creator of the Destiny 2 website Bray.tech, is credited as the designer of the Destiny icon set, but he wrote on Twitter that he doesn’t want his work used in this way because the designs aren’t his. Most of the icons were stolen from font files created by Bungie and its designers, and most of them were designed by Bungie, and he (and others) just recreated them. The question now is whether Nexon stole the icons from Iconduck, since they had to cut corners here and there when making a free-to-play game.

Nexon probably didn’t take it seriously, because they should have checked everything. But they should have done their homework.

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