I mean its either complete ineptitude or intentionally malicious. They had the actual artists watermark in the game and at no point questioned what the text "Antireal Daily Series" means in the context of Marathon. They also had a meme that was hidden within the stolen art show up in the game as well. This has happened so many times with Bungie but you rarely if ever hear about it from other studios, probably because they are double, triple and quadrouple checking this unlike Bungie? Bungie 100% deserves the flak they are getting since they have done this one too many times.

I contract for a publisher on occasion. Was there to do a presentation when I noticed one of the books on their wall had a color swapped Timmy Turner from [i]Fairly Odd Parents[/i] on it with a little propeller on his cap. I pointed it out and when they didn't know what I was talking about I pulled up a picture on google. Turns out they'd contracted another company to do the art and that's what they'd been provided, but because they're a Taiwanese company and [i]Fairly Odd Parents[/i] wasn't big here, no one had caught it until I saw it.

Exactly this, it's really easy for people to attribute this to malicious laziness but people just don't get how easily this kind of thing happens. Especially with the info we've now gotten where it just seems like a genuine issue of mismanagement during the chaos of the layoffs. So long as they address it properly and work out something with the original artist, it's fair to attribute this to a mistake rather than any genuine ill intent.

I would agree except the original artist appears to be a key inspiration for the look of the game (not just the bits that were directly copied). So even if it was done accidentally, it’s incredibly careless.

That's a slippery slope to start going down, because that gets into talks of art style rather than actual art. Firstly, antireal, the artist who has been plagiarized here, even says that there's some leeway given that they're working in the same artstyle. Antireal has been doing art in this style for a long time, and is one of the pioneers of this style, but didn't invent it and doesn't have sole claim to it. The styles match, but that could be due to any number of factors. What it seems like happened is that an employee put together a mood board using some of antireals art, given that they were working in the similar style it would likely seem a good idea to look at how other artists in that style do their work, and then that employee was terminated. The studio likely had that moodboard on hand with the assets on them, but didn't know what it was and assumed it was a finished texture sheet. Yes, incredibly careless, but all still within the realm of a genuine mistake made by people who are probably being crunched hard enough that they don't have time to double and triple check things like this.