The First Descendant contains icons from Destiny 2, and one theory about how they got there is a reminder that not everything on the internet is what it purports to be
It came to light recently that an awful lot of icons in The First Descendant look an awful lot like icons in Destiny 2—far more than anyone could reasonably attribute to coincidence. Some have been adjusted to a small degree, others are just about straight-up copies, and it all seemed very strange: Would Nexon, a major player in the games business, really just steal assets from genre competitor Bungie, as if nobody would notice?
Shortly after the similarities were noticed, an explanation was put forward: Destiny 2 and The First Descendant both appear to make use of free-to-use icons sourced from a site called Iconduck. That seemed to make sense at first blush, but it raised an obvious follow-up question: Why the hell would Bungie use free artwork? We're not talking about a one-person indie working on their first project, after all: Destiny 2 is one of the biggest shooters on the planet.
That question led me down the real rabbit hole. Iconduck does indeed host a pile of «free open source icons and illustrations»—nearly 274,000 of them, according to its website—which can be used «for personal and commercial purposes,» but many of them appear to be stolen from other companies or games.
The Destiny icons collection, for instance, includes 204 icons which are offered as open source under a Creative Commons license. The set includes everything from the Destiny logo and class icons to faction logos, weapon icons, and even the Xbox and Microsoft Windows logos. It also carries a completely baffling set description calling Destiny icons «a bit obscure,» which is not a word I would use to describe the game Sony paid $3.6 billion to get.
Other offerings on Iconduck include various Pokémon icons, which the site says «can be used on your website, branding and designs,» for «both personal and commercial purposes and projects.»
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but I'm pretty sure Pikachu cannot be used for commercial purposes not approved by The Pokémon Company. It's also very clearly
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