After the incident broke out, Tuan issued a statement on Monday that some animations in the game were accused of plagiarizing assets from other games. “We’ve been very transparent about purchasing some game-ready assets from the Epic Marketplace. As a three-person studio, utilizing the Epic Marketplace has accelerated our development schedule, with only about 10% of content being outsourced. The development team explained: “We purchased these assets from Epic Marketplace and believe that Epic, like all marketplace sellers, has been vetted before selling assets. While we cannot judge, given that the seller passed all checks, we are not aware of any any infringement.”
At the same time that this statement was published, the team has also contacted Epic, and today the team updated the response received from Epic: “According to the Marketplace profit sharing agreement, each Marketplace seller declares and warrants to Epic that they own the uploaded content. Appropriate rights. However, like any store consigning third-party content, Epic cannot independently verify such rights, and Epic does not provide such guarantees with purchases.”
In response to Epic’s reply, the development team pointed out that, therefore, Epic cannot essentially verify the copyright of animations purchased through their store. Although the team wasn’t happy with this response, they decided to replace store-bought assets in the next few days; some fixes have been made in a recent update, with more to come. “This is a huge lesson for us, and I hope other indie game creators will heed it,” the team said.
Finally, the team once again thanks everyone for reminding them of this matter and helping them improve the game content.