The situation soon cleared up, clearing the name of the studio: someone stole visual effects and resold them as their own for After Effects.
The presentation of No More Heroes 3 at The Game Awards was a pleasant surprise for fans of the adventures of Travis Touchdown and fans of Suda51 in general. However, there has been a controversy over possible plagiarism that has served to reveal that a company has been monitoring visual effects to resell them for use After Effects, the well-known Adobe video editing software.
Studio Plumeau reported on the social network Twitter that in the video presentation of the game, they had detected the use of one of its visual effects. And this animation team felt that someone in the company of Goichi Suda had stolen his work. “Who do we pass the bill to?”, They came to say in the message, already withdrawn after clarifying the situation.
The development team took a short time to get in touch with Studio Plumeau and explain that the effect in question was purchased within a resource pack sold by an external company for use in After Effects. Studio Plumeau himself withdrew his accusations from Twitter and posted a message exposing the explanations they had received.
Update on the whole #NoMoreHeroes3 fx animation debacle. We have received word from the person in charge of the fx animation in the trailer. The animation was indeed purchased on @envato. The user was selling lots of different assets made by many other fx artists as well.
— Studio Plumeau (@StudioPlumeau) December 14, 2019
“The person in charge of the effects animation in the trailer has talked to us. That animation was bought in Envato. The user sold many different resources made by other visual effects artists, ” said Studio Plumeau. It was uncovered, thus, how a scammer steals visual effects from third parties to resell them as their own in a digital visual resources store.
For now, it has not been publicly indicated who has been responsible for this theft of the work of Studio Plumeau and other artists. Still, they have stated that it has not been Denis Kozionov, who was at the center of a very similar controversy a few years ago.
Also the user responsible was not Denis Kozionov (aka Denis Kozyon) he was already banned from @envato back in 2015 for copyright infringements.
— Studio Plumeau (@StudioPlumeau) December 14, 2019
Without much more details at the moment, Studio Plumeau, Grasshopper Manufacture and Envato are working on a solution to eliminating stolen visual effects.
The situation has been clarified quickly, without suspicion of the development study, and we will have to see if they offer us an alternative version of the trailer without resources from Studio Plumeau, although since they did not act in bad faith, it is to be assumed that this is not necessary.
Travis Touchdown will once again have the voice of Robin Atkin Downes, in this new game. Nobuaki Kaneko will be responsible for the original soundtrack. Yusuke Kozaki, the leading character designer of the first two installments of Wii, returns to play a role in this No More Heroes 3.
Masanori Ushiki, a Japanese artist, known for his surrealist designs, will design some of the final bosses of the adventure, while Kenichiro Mizuno will be responsible for the design of a new character presented in the video: Damon.