Herschel “DrDisrespect” Beahm IV founded his own AAA studio called Midnight Society in December 2021. It was supposed to be a competitor to CoD Warzone and Apex Legends, but it is currently only regarded as a brazen thief, as the studio allegedly stole from a “Cyberpunk 2077” trailer. MeinMMO reports on what is going on.
Why is Midnight Society considered a thief? DrDisrespect’s own game studio is currently considered a thief because they displayed a well-known image as a background on their website.
The image on the homepage was taken from a 9-year-old trailer for the open-world action game Cyberpunk 2077, as the Twitter user inhuman showed:
However, the theft turned out to be a simple mistake. The developers stated in the tweet that it had nothing to do with Cyberpunk at all. One of the web developers had uploaded an optimization that was supposed to change the background image in the video on the page. By mistake, the image from Cyberpunk 2077 was uploaded – so the wrong image.
Difficult start for the AAA studio Midnight Society
Already beforehand, the studio had to take criticism because DrDisrespect uses NFTs to further develop his planned game.
How do NFTs work in DrDisrespect’s game? His fans can become “founders” by setting up a wallet on the homepage. They then receive a profile picture, a “Day Zero” patch for the future game, and NFTs. If the founders wish, they can further support the project by buying additional NFTs.
However, the game itself is supposed to be neither about NFTs nor about investing in them. Nevertheless, many of Doc’s fans are not thrilled and claim to have discovered his “true intentions”.
This is what users say under the tweet from inhuman:
- Angius wrote: “Hey, don’t worry, it’s an NFT game. Stolen images are expected.”
- SamuraiKillR also comments: “An image stolen on an NFT website? Wow, who can believe it?”
- Trash says: “Uff, it already looks bad and it hasn’t even started.”
- A.E.M. is on the side of the studio: “If you judge a whole studio and its game for using OPTIONAL NFTs, I don’t think your problem lies with NFTs.”
Most Twitter users are not surprised and do not think it was a coincidence. Nevertheless, there are a few quiet voices suggesting that it often happens in the web area to use placeholder images to test functions. So it could be that this was the case here as well.
The mistake has already been corrected and the image has been removed from the website.
