Score One For Artists As Activision Removes Plagiarized "Loyal Samoyed" Cosmetics From Call Of Duty

Cosmetic skins can be great. Some players love and collect them and companies can't wait to put another one in their cash shops to make even more money. When those skins aren't yours to sell though, that's when problems arise.

That's exactly what happened when Activision attempted to add (and of course sell) a "Loyal Samoyed" cosmetic to Call of Duty: Warzone. Sure, the cosmetic for operator Kim Tae Young looked awesome, and fluffy, and...yeah, just awesome...but it wasn't theirs.

Taking to Twitter last week, Saillin5 pretty much laid the plagiarism bare with a pretty detailed comparison showing the amazing amount of similarities between the new skin and art they posted to ArtStation back in December of 2019. It's a pretty open and shut case.

I have to explain this matter, COD Vanguard Samoye skin plagiarism.https://t.co/ltHTSNhEtf #CallofDutyVanguard #COD #Vanguard @Activision pic.twitter.com/OD2M4WNUms

— saillin (@saillin5) July 29, 2022

We talked about this accusation on our podcast last week and said we'd watch to see if there was any update from Activision or Raven Software. Today there was as Activision told Polygon that "We have the utmost respect for creativity and content creation. We love the Loyal Samoyed, but regrettably we erred in our process and have removed this imagery from the game. We apologize for the misstep."

What they didn't say was that someone was fired for pushing this up the chain as their own creation or that any compensation would be given to the artist. While it's great to see them acknowledge the issue...that's really the bare minimum they need to do in these types of cases and it shouldn't just be up to individual artists to search the internet to see if their work is being stolen by some big AAA company.

Without consequences for the companies that have this happen, we'll just, sadly, continue to see it happen over and over again. This is even more likely given how much "creative" work is actually farmed out to smaller companies...but maybe I'm being cynical and things will change, we'll see.