A mobile game called Paladins Strike got a fair amount of attention recently for stealing another game's art. Specifically, the game took background art from Overwatch, one of the world's most popular games and kind of a big deal in the competitive scene. The theft was obviously exposed, and now Paladins Strike's developer is claiming it was all a big mistake.

News that Paladins Strike was using Overwatch art broke on the Overwatch subreddit. This post contains a gif that shows the Paladins Strike image compared to the Overwatch one. It's plain to see that the background of Paladins Strike is straight-up taken from Overwatch's Lijiang Tower.

The only thing Hi-Rez, Paladins Strike's developer, could do is respond. The game's Art Director left this comment on the Reddit thread: "First thing, thank you for your diligence in pointing this out. This art was created by a 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."

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."

Basically, they admitted to outsourcing the art to another studio and not giving it a second glance before it went into the game. Following that is a promise to do better by paying more attention to where art comes from and creating more unique Paladins-style art.

Funnily enough, the comment directly responding to this points out the use of a Heroes Of The Storm loading screen in Paladins Strike. Things don't look so good for Hi-Rez's integrity at this point. Which is a shame, because Paladins (the regular one) is a genuinely fun game that is overshadowed by Overwatch's popularity. Unfortunately, stealing the competition's art, be it accident or no, isn't going to help their case. Here's hoping they really can fix the art and turn things around.