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Rainbow Six Siege hacks can completely mess up cameras and drone screens, giving you this distorted tearing overlay like an old VHS tape that's ripped and battered. But it turns out that glitched overlay might've been stolen from a digital artist and game dev called Sam Blye.
On December 21, they posted their work while comparing it to the Weather Channel's overlay, saying that they look incredibly similar: "Hey, uh, I don't mean to be that guy, but is that my texture that I published with a specifically attribution-noncommercial creative commons license being used specifically for commercial purposes with zero attributions by a company who's far wealthier than me?"
This led to them using Tineye (a reverse image search software) on their work to try and discern how often it has been stolen. Alarmingly, there have been "dozens and dozens of commercial projects" that used their work, one being Rainbow Six Siege. Later in the thread, they share a side-by-side of Siege's hacked drones and cameras from a Twitch VOD they found thanks to a Reddit user called SeanD21A. They were looking through some old photos and it looks very... uh, similar.
As seen in the Tweet embedded above, Blye alleges that Ubisoft took the work and altered it by flipping and displacing it. The green section follows the same jagged pattern which they also highlight. But for those who struggle to see it, Blye posted an animated fade comparison where their artwork is overlayed on top. It's near-identical, fitting perfectly.
"Yes, Ubisoft Montreal stole my glitch artwork, ignored my licensing, and put it in their triple-A game without providing me any credit or compensation for my work," Blye said. "This is [ridiculous]. I'm actually shaking right now. Finding more examples just by looking up screenshots of the game. It's all over it, used constantly for the signal disruptor effects."
Blye made the texture when they were 15, saying that the techniques used were basic, but they have since made a new glitch effect that involves "reverse-engineered real-time compression." The old technique is then the same every time, and "corruption images don't tend to be per-byte identical to others ever." Ubisoft has yet to comment.