Gearbox Software president and CEO Randy Pitchford says that the box art featured in Call of Duty WWII is a rip-off of the old Brothers in Arms from 2008.
Call of Duty WWII is the next installment in the hugely successful Call of Duty franchise and it's not even out yet. A full reveal is set for next week and the game already stirred great hype, but it also sparked some controversy regarding its WWII storyline and its box art.
Call Of Duty WWII Art Stolen From Brothers In Arms?
Pitchford took to Twitter to drop a bomb, calling out the uncanny similarity between the Call of Duty WWII box art and the Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway official art. Pitchford even posted a side-by-side comparison of the two games's art and it does indeed bear a striking resemblance.
I'll just leave this right here. pic.twitter.com/Id29bfTaU7
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) April 21, 2017
Both Call of Duty WWII and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway place the action in a World War II setting and both depict the wartime nearly identically, down to the close-ups of the soldier's face.
In another tweet, Pitchford posted another image of a Brothers in Arms limited edition cover that again looks strikingly similar to the Call of Duty WWII box art recently shown in an Amazon UK listing. Check out a collage of these two images side by side:
Coincidence?
It's tough to tell whether the artists behind the Call of Duty WWII design intentionally drew inspiration from Gearbox Software's Brothers in Arms artwork, but the similarity is apparent enough to raise some questions.
At the same time, it's worth taking into account that basically every AA FPS title the game industry has seen in the past half a decade has features the face of a soldier. At one point it's bound to look similar to some other artwork featuring the face of a soldier, so is this just a coincidence?
Call of Duty WWII will arrive as the first World War II installment in the Call of Duty franchise since World at War came out in 2008, bringing the franchise "back to its roots."
Activision teamed up with Sledgehammer Games to develop Call of Duty WWII and there are high stakes for the game, especially since Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the latest installment in the series, performed worse than the publisher expected. Previous reports indicate that first-month sales of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare were 50 percent lower than the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 sales during its first month on the market.
A number of theories tried to explain the poor performance of Infinite Warfare and one of them speculated that gamers were sick of the futuristic theme in the series. With that in mind, going back to its roots and launching a World War II game makes sense.
It remains to be seen how Call of Duty WWII will perform, but for now we're still waiting for the big reveal set to take place on April 26, at 10 p.m. PDT. In the meantime, what do you think about the artwork? Is it too similar to the art of Brothers in Arms? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
