Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is a city-builder that has a particular focus on how urban planning worked alongside the communist economies of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. It’s not for everyone, then, but it certainly has its fans.
Sadly those fans are now the only ones able to play the game, because it is now unable to be purchased by anyone else after a DMCA takedown reportedly got the game removed from Steam’s marketplace.
In a post made by the game’s developers, Slovakian studio 3Division, it’s claimed that a player, “once a respected member of our community”, has gone rogue and begun attacking the game’s online presence, trying to get everything from trailers to the game’s website taken down.
Why? It’s alleged that this player had written a guide on a way to play the game more realistically, and that while the developers had already been working on a game mode that did just that, they had agreed to add him to the game’s credits as a goodwill gesture given his prominence in the community.
3Division say this player then, having been told they wouldn’t added to the credits until after this new mode had been completed and released, “started to abuse the YouTube report system issuing copyright strikes to one of our most helpful influencers”, and that as a result of this behaviour they withdrew their offer to officially thank him.
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In response to this, it’s claimed the player then reported the game’s website and had it taken down (the link now directs back to 3Division’s main company page), then began reporting other official YouTube videos from the studio as well. Matters have now escalated to the point where the game itself has been taken off Steam due to a DMCA request, and the player is “now claiming that they own the rights to the [realistic] game mode”. For what it’s worth, 3Division say they are “are working to resolve the issue”.
UPDATE 4:55am ET, February 17: 3Division’s Peter Adamcik says the fan in question is a lawyer, and tells Kotaku:
It is very disturbing. First, the individual with law knowledge think he can better secure his rights than some other players. Another aspect why we would afraid to put him into credits would be that other players would get angry about it because his ideas was definitively not new. It seems like he just abuse the fact he is attorney at law – he will definitively handle the suit cheaper than us, so he think he may get anything he wanted from us because we will not go for costly suit. But legally he not have any ground under his foot to stay on and we will probably fight to the end! According to our opinion he is at big risk also – reputation, financial damage, also what he is doing is not with ethic either) If the game stays banned this will result into a enormous financial damage (aside from suit cost) for us and also for Valve…
Another aspect what is very sad is that, DMCA mechanics just not works, seems like anybody can claim anything, the service provider is just forced to remove the content and in general not ask or nor the considering if the claims are real. Signed lawyer seems enough and everybody get fear from long and costly suits, content is then removed.
This is Sad!
Luke Plunkett
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