The real-time strategy/first-person shooter hybrid Eximius was hit with a DMCA recently. That's nothing particularly new for a game, but what is interesting is the source of said DMCA: the game's own developers.
A news post on the game's Steam Community page has all of the details regarding the DMCA of Eximius. Thankfully, the developers have provided a tl;dr to explain things quickly:
Long story short, we had to file a DMCA against our very own game on Steam to wrest it off the Publisher (TheGameWallStudios). The DMCA has just kicked in resulting in the game being taken off the Steam Store Page. Legal action is in process of being taken because the publisher has went off grid and has not made any payment of the sale of the game to developers. TheGameWallStudios has breached publishing agreement and their rights to distribute has been terminated.We certainly hear about more than a few dodgy uses of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act these days. As an example, a video of a silly Grand Theft Auto V mod was hit with one which was eventually reversed. It appears that this particular case is something more in line with the intended use of the law. According to the developers, their previous publisher had effectively not paid them what was owed for several months.
An AMA on Reddit's /r/gamedev subreddit goes into a bit more detail, and it, unfortunately, appears that the Eximius devs weren't the only ones to have problems with this particular publisher. Another Redditor by the name of /u/e-vinyl stated that they found themselves in a shockingly similar situation with the same publisher. Although e-vinyl says that they were eventually able to recover their game, he states that they haven't yet received the money they should have as per their agreement.
After several months, developer Ammo Box Studios appears to have control of their game Eximius once again. You can check it out on Steam and please do consider popping over to their official Discord. If this seems like the sort of game you'd like to play, you can grab it for $29.99 or your regional equivalent.
What do you think of the Eximius developers having to DMCA their own game? Does this seem like the sort of game you'd like to play? Let us know in the comments below!
