This situation has somehow just become even more bizarre. Not many emails put me into shock but I literally had my jaw drop when I received an email yesterday. With all these events stacked, I simply cannot keep quiet.
While I will share these details, I was originally not going to name shame anyone, including the artist involved - but with all of these events along with waking up today, he's done too many malicious things to myself, our product, everyone on the team that *does* work their ass off - and has already been fired as mentioned.
His name is Binh Le
https://www.artstation.com/artist/binhle
Starting off, I want to share these three chat logs. While the artist initially was helpful, offering to remake the asset at no cost, he went quiet shortly after and became uncooperative and wouldn't inform us of any of the other assets that may have infringed.
There were OTHER assets that infringed that the public was unaware of, these are the same assets privately sent to me by Activision in which convinced me immediately that the artist involved was in the wrong and it was a blatant rip. This included our Sniper Rifle, Burst Rifle and Rocket Launcher. Chat logs below, Dates/time-stamps all available:
( WEIRDEST APPLICATION EVER )
Now I just received an yesterday from a 3D artist applying for a job. This was not a typical application:
"Let me get straight to the point (I'll be honest with you guys. It's risky but I'll do it anyway): I'm very sorry for your recent trouble and congrats on getting your game back on Steam. Though you don't know me but I'm the artist who worked on the Light Mech and the Blaster gun you've just received few days ago."
In short, the artist who was responsible for all violating assets against Activision was also outsourcing assets to other artists unknowingly to us, acting as if was creating these. This was something that'd be extremely hard to detect as he would regularly send work-in-progress images for feedback acting as if he was creating it as expected:
This shocked me for quite a bit. Never expected this, way larger than ever anticipated. He was not only taking Trek funds but paying them less and pocketing the rest.
This sent me into a research frenzy to learn as much as I could and I started going through years of documentation and information. This included all the way back to Spiral Game Studios mailing, from 2012-2013.
( LET'S GET STARTED )
I cannot confirm that Binh Le and TIn Le are the same person but at minimum they are connected in some form.
Tin Le was removed in the past (Aug 6, 2014) for submitting stolen content, relating to VFX work. You can read about that here:
https://www.facebook.com/trekindustries/posts/785489094816049
*UPDATED*
While I cannot say it with absolute certainty, I believe that Tin Le and Binh Le are the same person. Regardless, they/he has begun removing information, such as the artstation link. I simply don't want this to happen to anyone else and I have uploaded any information related to them/him that I have to prevent such. Resume/Cover Letters below:
Tin Le Resume
Tin Le Portfolio
Binh Le Portflio
Binh Le Resume
In addition to all of this, we woke up today to a user submitting another incident of infraction, relating to an asset created by Binh Le which is related to our newer Harvesting unit. You can read more about that thread here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/407840/discussions/0/351660338715884928/
( FIXING AS FAST AS POSSIBLE )
When waking up today and seeing this its obvious that is also an infraction. This unit is also being removed from the game as fast as we can. The problem is we upgraded the entire engine yesterday (4.12.4) to include a new version from Epic.
This has some really nice optimizations but doing an entire engine upgrade is sort of like open heart surgery and putting out a patch so soon is very scary as there could be lots of elements still needing love from said port.
( LOOKING FOR HELP )
We are currently working on addressing all of this but everyone here simply wants to get back to work and normality and any support anyone can provide in this time is much appreciated.
This is far more severe than I imagined and we are looking for genuine 3D artists to assist us in remaking these assets and catching up. This is of course paid work, just asking for help. Contact directly if able at:
[email protected]
( THE SHORT VERSION )
In the end, for anyone not in the industry to understand - these freelancers cost Trek thousands to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, ranging from actual investments towards tasks/content that is now trash - all the way to who that content has to be "touched" by, and for 3D content that includes Rigging/Skeletons by the Technical Team, Animation Sets by the Animation team, and Integration by the Programming team including Shader/Bones/Origins and more.
All of this content, people or time costs money and all of that content is now trash.
In addition to that it removed the game during the largest event of the year, causing significant damages. That is in addition to having to spend all of our times and resources now editing/deleting images, redoing entire trailers and having other talent who are supposed to be working on OTHER content come and do backwards development to repair all affected assets. In addition, we are hiring MORE talent (more costs) to assist in this.
TL;DR:
Don't hire these people.