NFT Game Steals Artwork, Gets Called Out, Deletes Account

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are an environmental disaster and an enormous scam, and perhaps the funniest thing about their persistence is how little effort purveyors of this modern snake oil put into it.

Take Epic Hero Battles, for example. A “blockchain-based game” on the “Ethereum network,” it was trying to sell 10,000 NFTs that consisted of a randomly-generated hero and their pet, which could then be put into battle to win either prizes or…more NFTs.

I’m not sure how randomly-generated they would have been, though, because despite the well-worn (and by September 2021 shown to be entirely bullshit) claim that NFTs are all about artists and ownership of their work, for its main page the game’s creators decided to just straight up steal a piece of key art from indie game Wildfire, which came out just last year and is pretty damn good

OK NFTs you've made this personal now pic.twitter.com/Q7aKeGhMxT

— Dan Hindes (@dhindes) September 11, 2021

After Wildfire’s creator Dan Hindes called the game’s creators out on Twitter (at 52k likes and counting), Epic Hero Battles’ creators removed Hindes’ art from their page and publicly responded, saying:

Hi guys! I want to tell you about the art that was used on the site. We got it from the web dev, but we didn’t check it, our mistake. This won’t happen again, honestly.

Ah, an innocent mistake! Or not, since with the theft of Wildfire’s assets out in the open, other folks started going through Epic Hero Battles’ website and Twitter account and found more art that had been stolen.

The game’s Twitter profile pic? Lifted straight from this artist’s Tumblr post. This big piece of art announcing the game’s roadmap for the future that’s below? Stolen wholesale from this very cool piece of pixel art by Boki Boki.

Rather than try to respond to these fresh allegations of theft, or perhaps be forced to put in even the slightest amount of their own work, the creators of Epic Hero Battles have simply deleted their Twitter account instead. And while its website is still active, it’s now missing almost all of its art, leaving in their wake a big grey mass.

In the meantime you can buy Wildfire here.