Call of Duty: Warzone Accused of Plagiarism For Second Time in a Month

By Cade Onder

The developers of Call of Duty: Warzone has been accused of plagiarism once again, just after recovering from a similar accusation. Call of Duty has evolved quite a bit since its early days in the online gaming scene. Activision has found ways to monetize the game long-term outside of traditional DLC. It all started with loot boxes before taking it up a notch with individual skins and battle passes. Call of Duty now regularly releases brand new skins and other cosmetic items, but it seems that this is creating a problem as the team was accused of plagiarizing a recently announced skin for Call of Duty: Warzone. The skin featured a furry dog-like creature in tactical gear, which was nearly identical to a piece of art from artist Sail Lin. Activision has since apologized for this and pulled it from release.

However, history is repeating itself once again, but this time the work comes from an ex-Call of Duty developer. Robert Bowling was a community manager at Infinity Ward up until March 2012, shortly after the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. He's now working at Midnight Society with Dr Disrespect on a new FPS called Deadrop that aims to compete with Call of Duty. Bowling's profile picture on Twitter features a character from the game and coincidentally, a new character in Call of Duty: Warzone looks mighty similar. Bowling himself did not accuse Activision of plagiarism, but did make a tweet stating that Activision should "at least name it after me."

Given a similar incident happened at the end of July, this is a pretty bad look. As of right now, Activision has not offered any kind of public statement on the matter. It's also unclear if the character will be outright removed. Either way, it's expected that none of these skins will carry over to Call of Duty: Warzone 2, a game that's rumored to release in November.

What do you think of Call of Duty getting accused of plagiarism once again? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

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