Call of Duty's New Samoyed Skin Has Allegedly Been "Plagiarized"

Last week, Raven Software shared patch notes for Call of Duty: Warzone teasing new skins including the upcoming "Loyal Samoyed" skin for operator Kim Tae Young. The new skin, however, was met with some controversy as it was allegedly stolen from an artwork posted on ArtStation more than two years ago.

Chinese artist Sail Lin recently took to Twitter claiming that the new COD's doggy skin was heavily inspired by the "Samoye Medical" concept art they created in 2019 as a part of their "Monster Army" series which depicts various animals including several dog breeds, tigers, alligators, and polar bears as soldiers.

As the artist pointed out on Twitter, the similarities between the "Loyal Samoyed" skin and the concept are not limited just by the fact that the new skin represents a creature with the head of a giant fluffy dog and a body of a man but also has almost identical clothing (like similar scarf pattern, a backpack attachment, a left arm-only elbow pad, and a right leg-only pack). 

Sail Lin believes that their work has been "plagiarized" as Acitivion never contacted him to discuss the possible use of their concept and shared that they reached out to Activision asking for an explanation as to why this happened. 

"Even though I am also a COD player, I am very disappointed to see my work being plagiarized by a big company like Activision in this way," Sail Lin wrote. "As an individual artist, I can only do so much, and I have to speak out about this to stop things like this happening again in the future."

Raven Software hasn't yet made an official statement about the matter, although soon after Sail Lin's twit went viral, it scrubbed the patch notes blog post of any images featuring the Samoyed skin.