AION 2's Style Shop Scandal: Celebrity Lookalike Presets Draw Fire
Published 2025-12-18Updated 2026-09-194 min read
AION 2's Style Shop lets players sell character presets — and lookalikes of real Korean celebrities are being listed under their real names, sparking a legal and ethical debate.
AION 2's deeply flexible character creator was always going to produce faces that look familiar. What nobody priced in was how quickly those faces would become a marketplace problem.
How the Style Shop Works
The Style Shop is an in-game trading system where players upload their character creation presets and sell them to other players, with revenue split between the creator and the publisher. Combined with a creator that offers over 200 customization parameters, it gives talented designers a real income stream — and gives everyone else instant access to polished looks.
Where It Went Wrong
With that much control over a face, some creators went straight past "original design" into lookalike territory: presets closely resembling real Korean celebrities, several listed under the stars' actual names. Because the game also stocks a large wardrobe of revealing outfits, many of these celebrity-faced characters were being posed and dressed in ways the original people never agreed to.
The community split almost immediately. One camp condemns the practice as harassment wearing a marketplace UI; the other argues that anything permitted by the system is fair game. Korean lawyer Jeong-Mok Kang added a sharper edge to the debate, noting that both the creators selling such presets and NC — as the operator providing the marketplace — could face real legal exposure.
For a game whose character customization is one of its headline features, the incident is a stress test for UGC moderation. Expect clearer listing rules as the global launch approaches.