Update March 31st, 9:12 AM: Sega has retracted their DMCA of SteamDB's Yakuza: Like a Dragon page, and it is now online again. Here's their full statement:
Regarding SteamDB Takedowns:
Earlier this week, one of our games was incorrectly flagged on SteamDB. We utilize anti-piracy software to protect our games at a large scale, but sometimes it makes mistakes. SEGA will continue to fine-tune these systems to avoid this in the future and we appreciate SteamDB cooperating with us to resolve the issue quickly.
The original article is below:
Yakuza: Like a Dragon's SteamDB page has been taken down because Sega's lawyers has sent them a DMCA because they think they're distributing the game. This was first shared through Twitter, where Pavel Djundik, the self-described developer/dataminer/creator of SteamDB, has announced that SteamDB was forced to take down their Yakuza: Like a Dragon page due to Sega apparently not understanding what SteamDB is.
According to SteamDB's FAQ page, "SteamDB does not support piracy, it does not provide downloads, it does not sell keys, it does not link to any websites that do any of these activities." They also embed Steam's official widget for those interested in purchasing the game, and the main purpose of the website is to display information and statistics about Steam applications. All of the information is publicly gathered through Steam APIs and "functionality similar to the Steam client." All images assets are also from the Steam content delivery network.
Can anyone help getting in touch with SEGA?
— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) March 29, 2021
Their lawyers are trying to take down Yakuza: Like a Dragon's SteamDB page claiming that we distribute the game.
I took the page down because they did not reply to the first abuse report and sent a new one to our hoster.
It is highly probable the issue here is down to some automation flagging the page, and lack of appropriate human oversight on confirming it is an actual problem, instead just signing off. It is also possible that lawyers overstepped what was meant, or Japanese executives have run into confusion with the internet (... again).
TechRaptor has sent emails to both SteamDB and Sega asking for more information on this issue. At the time of publishing, we haven't received a response from either party, and if we receive word back we'll update this article as soon as we can.
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