Game:

The Sinking City (2019)

Category:

Discussion

Duration: 3:42

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For those of you who may not know, DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Without going into too much detail here, it's the main way people can protect their intellectual property online, where everything is very easy to copy and paste. However, the DMCA is easily weaponized. For fear of legal repercussions, platforms take copyright claims very seriously. And it's very easy to issue one even to the point where action will often be taken before the issuer has proven they own that IP. DMCA has been at the forefront of many scandals online. The most recent is the music industry's take on online streams. Often issuing DMCA strikes against streamers who play their music in the background. This can lead to the platform taking action against the streamer, from a warning to a flat-out ban. All this to say that DMCA can be very damaging to content creators and can be very hard to fight against. So you may be surprised to learn that Frogwares issued a DMCA strike against their own game.

There are many examples of DMCA strikes causing havoc for an individual's youtube channel or twitch stream, both big and small. But just earlier this year, we got an example of what happens when a copyright complaint is levied against a developer on Steam.

This is Luciform, a 2d platformer developed by one-man developer Chaos Games. In an Imgur post, Chaos Games describes how a DMCA strike hurt his game. Upon launch, Luciform had over 5000 views on its store page. However, soon after that, he was hit with a copyright strike. After a few hours of back and forth with the third party who issued the strike, Chaos Games received an apology, and the strike was receded. It took a week for the game's store page to go back on Steam, which I'm told is fast for Steam, but sadly the damage had already been done. Money spent on the game's marketing was lost as potential customers could only find an error page on Steam. Influencers hoping to review or play the game in front of their audience couldn't do so. Chaos Games also theories that because the store page saw no traffic during the strike, the steam algorithm had deemed the store page a failed one. And no longer recommends the game to potential customers. After a year of solo development, a careless copyright claim has severely hindered Luciform's release. As you can see, a DMCA strike can be exceedingly hurtful to a developer's account. Which makes Frogwares' decision to strike their own game a drastic one.

Frogwares had been working with publisher Focus Entertainment developing several Sherlock Holmes games. However, after pitching a Lovecraftian horror game, their publisher liked their idea but decided to hire developers Cyanide to create the project that became Call of Cthulu. Being replaced for their Lovecraft-inspired game soured their relationship, and Frogwares left Focus Entertainment for Nacon. Releasing their own cosmic horror game, The Sinking City. A year before its release, their relationship with their publisher again fractured as Nacon purchased Cyanide in 2018. Frogwares had said in a statement later that "[They] couldn't fully trust Nacon from this moment and minimized the communication with the publisher." As development was wrapping up on The Sinking City, contract disputes broke out between Frogwares and Nacon.

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