Over the weekend, we covered a brewing storm in the world of Eternal Magic. The MMO, developed by Chinese studio Duoyi, just hit open beta, and players who leaped in are already generating with a growing pile of plagiarism accusations on Reddit. In a thread with now 470+ upvotes, players have annotated and screenshotted infractions, from sound files and skill icons and animations to whole maps and textures that resemble – rather convincingly and rather a lot – assets and ideas in games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2.
Before our piece ran Saturday, we reached out to the PR agency representing Eternal Magic’s Moscow-based publisher 101xp for comment on the accusations. Here is the statement conveyed to us today from 101xp through its PR; the studio essentially denies the accusations, saying it didn’t steal anything. It also seems to be implying that those gamers circulating the story are in it for the clickbait.
“The topic of plagiarism is always hot for everyone: both for the bloggers and for their audience. The developers of Eternal Magic didn’t steal anything from other developers. You can find many similar elements in well-known and beloved games – if you have a burning desire to. We will do our best providing our players the best game experience and we wish the blogger accusing Eternal Magic on plagiarism having as many subscribers as he wishes.”
Given Blizzard’s penchant for hunting down plagiarists in court, we expect we’ll be revisiting this story again.
