There was recently an article by IGN regarding a game company which apparently Kalashnikov first contacted to partner with and create a real mod kit over their designed "Mastodon" shotgun. But then they never sent over contracts and ended up releasing their "Ultima" shotgun kit.
To quote the relevant parts of the article in regards to tarkov
"And yet there was one more twist to come. Earlier this year, ultra-realistic shooter Escape From Tarkov added a fully-branded in-game kit for the MP-155 Ultima to its digital arsenal in June – presumably as part of a licensing deal with Kalashnikov. You can see images of the Escape from Tarkov version of the weapon in the gallery above. Ward B repeatedly emailed Tarkov developer Battlestate Games to say that it saw this as an unauthorized use of its designs, but Sauceda says he never received a reply.
Effectively, Sauceda believes that a version of his studio’s gun design made it into someone else’s game before it could ever have been released as part of his own. Sauceda sees this not just as a major loss of potential exposure for his little studio, but a huge factor for morale.
“A lot of the people that were working on the shotgun with us, every day they wake up and they see the Ultima, or they hear people talking about it,” Sauceda says. “It's completely demotivated a lot of us because it feels like [we could just be] making something, just for some international corporate-ran business to just take everything from us.”
Despite multiple requests for comment from IGN, Battlestate Games failed to reply."
So what essentially happened is this game company was approached by a VP from Kalashnikov who thought one of their shotgun designs was super cool, and were in discussion and ended up coming to an agreement over a partnership where they would produce real life kits for the mp 155. But when they were waiting for the paperwork to come over communication seemed to stop entirely, and then the "ultima" was put up for preorder and advertised around.
To paraphrase the dev stolen from "the mastadon showed up in another game before ours now".
