A promotional image for Hi-Rez Studios’ Paladins Strike mobile game seemingly lifted art assets from Blizzard’s hero shooter Overwatch, a mistake the developer has since chalked up to a lack of oversight in regards to outsourced work.
Hi-Rez is far from the first studio to come under fire for using assets from another game in a project and serves as a reminder to fellow developers of how important it is to carefully vet assets and promotional images ahead of release, especially when those assets aren't being developed in-house.
A reddit user posted a comparison gif of the two images on the Overwatch subreddit, noting that the cityscape in the background of the Paladins Strike promotional image was very nearly identical to the official art for Overwatch’s Lijiang Tower level.
The art director for the original Paladins replied to that thread under the username ThunderArtBrush, explaining that the art was created by a partner studio for the Paladins Strike game and that the disconnect is responsible for the stolen art being used in an official promotional image.
“First thing, thank you for your diligence in pointing this out. This art was created by an 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,” reads the reply from the art director. “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, stay tuned.”