Star Traders Kickstarter (lol)


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Hey, I'm not sure if anyone ever actually reads this subforum, but this should be relevant to all of you good people on the Paizo forums: recently a boardgame called Star Traders was Kickstarted and, you know, just managed to hit funding. I'm not really here to talk about the game, because it's not really my thing. What I'm here to talk about is the art of the game, some of which seems oddly familiar.

So, basically, their artist photoshopped new heads over art he found floating around the internet and applied a bunch of filters on them to make them look more cartoony. That alone is pretty scummy and bad, but when this was brought up with the game's developers they doubled down on it and claimed that any similarity to his reference images was just due to the artist's style (lol) when even a cursory glance at the pictures used in the Kickstarter and the images they're copies of reveals that very little by way of modification has been done to the images.

Furthermore, the developers said that this issue having been brought to their attention they were going to change the images, which really sends a mixed message: on one hand they are saying that their artist just has a unique style and did nothing wrong, but they're still going to change the images? I don't get it.

Anyway, the reason this should be relevant to the interests of Paizonians is that one of the images being traced photoshopped used as a reference image is, quite clearly, by Eric Belisle, specifically a piece he made for the Pathfinder RPG.

EDIT: I hit submit too early but then realized I didn't actually have anything more to add so carry on I guess!

EDIT: Here's a pretty good side-by-side comparison: Star Traders art on the left, original Pathfinder art on the right!


If that's the art, that seems pretty open and shut that have at least one violation.

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