Following uproar over Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket using fan art for a card in the new Wisdom of Sea and Sky expansion, The Pokémon Company has apologized and pulled the offending art entirely from the new release.
“We want to share an important update regarding the upcoming expansion, Wisdom of Sea and Sky,” The Pokémon Company said in a statement. “It has come to our attention that there was a production issue regarding the illustration of Ho-Oh featured in the immersive card artwork for Ho-Oh EX (3-Star) and Lugia EX (3-Star).
“After internal review, we discovered that the card production team provided incorrect materials as official documents to the illustrator commissioned to create these cards. As a result, both cards have been replaced with a temporary placeholder that the team is actively working to replace with new artwork as soon as it’s ready. We are also conducting a broader investigation to ensure no similar issues exist elsewhere in the game.”
Those “incorrect reference materials” were fan art of Legendary Pokémon Ho-Oh, which had been created by a fan and then seemingly recreated by an official Pokémon Trading Card Game artist.
The Pokémon Company’s apology included a promise to strengthen its “quality control processes to prevent this from happening again.”
The Wisdom of Sea and Sky expansion was released on Wednesday and currently features both Ho-Oh EX and Lugia EX with blank art, with the words “New Art Coming Soon.” Check out how the cards look below.
On Tuesday, Chinese artist lanjiujiu shared a side-by-side comparison on social media, highlighting striking similarities between their commissioned fan art of Ho-Oh from 2021 and a newly datamined official card credited to artist Sie Nanahara. The cards featuring that illustration of Ho-Oh, set to debut in the mobile game’s Wisdom of Sea and Sky add-on, shows near-identical elements — and the absence of credit to lanjiujiu did not go unnoticed by the Pokémon community.
Some encouraged lanjiujiu to take legal action, while others pointed to The Pokémon Company’s legal disclaimers, which suggest the company is aware that fans create artwork using its characters and reserves the right to reuse or modify those images. However, swiftly moving on this controversy and taking action hours before release may mean The Pokémon Company will change course on whether and how it approaches any possible reuse of fan art.
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is developed by Creatures Inc. and DeNA, and is available on Android and iOS devices.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/pokemon/617494/pokemon-tcg-pocket-ho-oh-art-apology-update
