Helldivers 2 is choosing up viral success—if you have not observed all of the articles we have written about its overburdened servers by now—and with that success have come the swarm of predictable and boring bloodsuckers, scammers, profiteers, and hangers-on that you simply would possibly anticipate. Probably the most formidable manifestation of this, to this point, is the massive swarm of stuff on the market on websites like Etsy utilizing outright-stolen designs from Helldivers 2.
It is easy to examine for your self: This is a hyperlink to an Etsy seek for Helldivers returning fairly actually tons of of outcomes. Most of it is simply stolen idea artwork, official paintings, and logos for the sport slapped onto generic shirts and mugs to provide essentially the most boring, lowest-common-denominator merch attainable.
Confronted with the black market stuff and requested in the event that they’re getting a reduce, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt commented that they don’t seem to be, and that he could be open to merch-makers approaching Arrowhead for a collaboration: “If you wish to promote one thing associated to Helldivers 2, attain out to the studio with a transparent proposal and we go from there!”
The large drawback is that these Etsy sellers aren’t even attempting to cook dinner up a cool, legally distinct new brand or intelligent catchphrase that matches. That might be the form of on-the-edge-of-legal fan merch that is nice for the neighborhood round a sport. It is maybe exacerbated by the half the place Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead does not have any official merch of their very own on the market.
It isn’t simply official paintings and logos being stolen, both. Fan artwork is simply as frequent a goal right here. Dozens upon dozens of entries are fan artwork and well-made memes stolen from Reddit and different social media posts earlier than getting slapped onto low-cost print-on-demand shirts, telephone instances, and the like. The most typical goal are all these neat propaganda posters folks have been making to help their favourite entrance or different within the galactic battle.
Not every thing there’s dangerous, in fact! A few of it is correctly completed spinoff fan work that is possible owned by the creator and does not step on anybody’s copyright. The overwhelming majority, nonetheless, is simply straight-up copying the logos and slapping them on a drop-shipped, printed-on-demand piece of tat. The one work the thief did there was importing a stolen picture file, if that.
Anyway, that is all very miserable and such, go examine how Helldivers 2 is without doubt one of the funniest video games in current reminiscence as a substitute.
