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An anonymous Redditor says Microsoft has lifted their idea for an advertisement for Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds without providing credit or compensation. The complaint has skyrocketed to the front page of Reddit, with nearly 70,000 upvotes at publication time.
The post, which comes from someone with the handle of Macsterr, points out that the recent Microsoft ad is visually similar to one that they created a month ago. Macsterr’s original concept is above, and the Microsoft ad is below.
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Microsoft’s ad remained online for an entire day, and was pulled down off of social media before 11:00 a.m. ET today.
“I‘m not saying I own any copyright,” Macsterr wrote, “but the original post has 63,000 views so I assume they saw it and I got no credits.”
Polygon has reached out to both Macsterr and Microsoft for further comment.
Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds entered the Xbox Game Preview program on Dec. 11, 2016, just a few days before the PC version of the game exited Steam’s Early Access program. The console version of the game lags behind the development of the PC version by about six months.
