If there’s one thing fans of battle royale shooters love to do—other than playing the games—it’s to create concepts for these games. Whole subreddits are birthed from fanfiction and fan-created lore regarding these games, and Apex Legends is no exception. Apex Legends fans are constantly pushing for some of their ideas to actually make it in the game. Sometimes it’s lore, and sometimes it’s skins or items. But no matter how cool these Apex Legends fan-made concepts seem, Respawn will never add them to the title.
The developer’s reason is very simple: plagiarism.
Apex Legends writer Tom Casiello took to Twitter to explain exactly why no fan-made ideas will enter the game, and simply put, it’s a 100% a CYA decision.
This has been a personal policy drilled into my head since my first writing gig in 1998. And it’s all about the worst case scenario. But it’s a worst case scenario that can end your career: the plagiarism accusation. There are only so many ideas, and if I accidentally stumble…
— Tom Casiello (@tommiecas) July 25, 2020
…did accidentally steal it? Let me explain. I wrote a joke into an episode of a tv show that I swear I thought of myself. Two months later I caught it on an episode of the simpsons from 1996. That line was somewhere in my subconscious and I had no idea it was from another show.
— Tom Casiello (@tommiecas) July 25, 2020
He goes on to say that he avoids “reading any fan-related Apex content.” However, he doesn’t discourage these creators either. “If they make you happy, don’t stop making them,” he tweeted.
This fear of plagiarizing creative content permeates every creative writer. It’s all too easy to question where you actually got an idea and its originality. Taking Tom’s example, it’s just as possible to write that joke without seeing an episode of The Simpsons. However, whom do you think a court of law will believe over the plagiarism of that joke?
The fear is real, and it’s a real struggle for these writers. Even if a creator were to give Respawn explicit permission to use their Apex Legends fan-made content in new lore for the upcoming season 6, who’s to say it won’t come back to bite them later, especially if that fan creator didn’t come up with the idea themselves?
Carry on your wayward content, my friends. Just don’t be disappointed when it never appears in Respawn’s game.
