In South Korea, Dark Souls has a following and fans. You’d think the makers of popular mobile game Blade would know they couldn’t get away with ripping it off. You’d think!
As tipster Sang points out, recently released action RPG Blade has hit number one on Google Play’s Top Grossing chart in South Korea. Developed by South Korean studio 4:33 Creative Lab, Blade was also released on iOS. The game’s ad has been accused of knocking off Dark Souls promotional art.
Courtesy of Game Donga, here is Dark Souls.
And here is the Blade advert, which appeared on Korean commuter trains.
Korean Dark Souls fans were quick to note that Blade‘s advertisement seems to look familiar. But the similarities don’t stop there. On Korean bulletin board Today’s Humour, stills from Blade trailer were compared with stills from the Dark Souls II trailer.
Below, you can see sets of images from both trailers (the Dark Souls II images are on the top of each set, with the Blade images underneath for comparison). Note that the Dark Souls II trailer is from 2012, and the Blade trailer is from earlier this year.
This is rather blatant! Gamemeca reports that 4:33 has taken down the Blade ad from Korean trains.
“We generally do not use an ad agency but in these two cases we did,” 4:33 told Gamemeca (via Sang). “We’ve worked with an outside ad agency to create and run these promotions. There is a clause in our contract with them saying the agency will fully be responsible if there is any third party copyright violation. We’ve sent the agency a legal note saying they have damaged our image.”
블레이드, 광고표절논란으로 화들짝. 큰손해 감수하고 즉각 대응 [Game Donga — Thanks Sang!]
Comments
3 responses to “Dark Souls Allegedly Ripped Off By Popular Korean Game”
Don’t get me wrong here, but are they not known for ripping off everything? i remember reading an article on kotaku showing all the copies and rip offs they do. (most familiar one to me was the TF2 rip off)
that’s china, not Korea, if this happened in china, the company wouldn’t have given a shit, international copyright means nothing over there.
I dunno if its alleged, but more on the side of blatant.
the ad was clearly ripped off, but I haven’t seen the actual trailers and those stills from the trailers are all of incredibly generic shots that you would find in most other trailers.