A model complains that the Chinese gaming giant Tencent had taken her image, created a character for the battle royale shooter “Ring of Elysium,” and sold it as a skin. That’s something new: Fortnite is only accused of copying dances.
This is the model: The Chinese-American model Mei Yan has 400,000 subscribers on YouTube and nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram. She is a model, blogger, and “internet personality.”
Yan recounts in a post on Instagram that she took a photo 5 years ago. The photo shows her in a black sweater, wearing a mask, and with her arms hanging down.
The gigantic Chinese corporation Tencent, on the other hand, took this photo, edited it with Photoshop, and created the character “Photographer Lynn” from it. This is a character icon for Ring of Elysium in the Adventurer Pass.
Mei Yan did not give her consent for this. She claims she was not even asked. She was only made aware of it by chance – the model has nothing to do with games.
This is the character in the game: The character “Lynn” in Ring of Elysium is an icon character in the new Adventurer Pass. Tencent promotes these characters centrally in the game as special skins. The skins are obtained when you purchase the “Adventurer Pass” – which is equivalent to the Battle Pass from Fortnite.
The icon skins are supposed to be expanded during a season. Additional accessories for Lynn have already been announced, such as a sweatshirt or a backpack with a cat theme.
This is how Tencent reacts: As reported by USGamer, Tencent has not commented on the allegations. However, the company has already taken offline promotional material featuring Lynn.
This is how the model reacts: Mei Yan seems somewhat astonished. Although it is normal for her content to be stolen, she says. But the extent of this has surprised her. It feels very strange.
The model says: “Players have paid for the Adventurer Pass and for access to this skin. I think, in a certain way, they were tricked, and that’s really, really not okay.”
This is behind it: Battle royale games are known for making pop culture references. In Fortnite, for example, actors, musicians, and the mothers of children complain that Epic has stolen their dances and profited a lot of money from it.
But to say that the entire character was stolen is quite new.
It will be interesting to see if and how Tencent reacts:
