Unomelon, the developer of Minecraft-inspired sandbox game Allumeria, says a DMCA from Microsoft, evidently related to Minecraft, got the game removed from Steam.

“The Allumeria Steam page is currently down because Microsoft has filed a false DMCA claim on it,” Unomelon said on Bluesky on Tuesday. “They sent an email earlier today claiming that this screenshot infringes on their copyright. I am taking a moment to figure out what my path is going forward, will update soon.”

The screenshot in question (above) is a simple wide shot of a forest filled with birch trees, what look to be oak trees with green and autumnal leaves, and a few pumpkins and weeds checkering the grassy dirt. There are definitely some similarities to Minecraft; if you told me this was a screenshot of a Minecraft mod, I’d probably believe you, but that’s true of many voxel-based games, including Hytale.

Direct link to the Bluesky post (Skylib)

  • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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    3 hours ago

    There’s a difference between saying something is inspired by X vs saying something is copying X.

    OpenTTD is a great example because it has its own selection of art assets that look like the original, but aren’t copying the original art. The open art assets are inspired by the original. But OpenTTD doesn’t come with the original assets nor can it make exact copies of the original assets because that would be copying the original.

    I’m not against being inspired by something, Allumeria dev has been pretty open that the game is inspired by Minecraft. But the people I’ve been arguing with here have the opinion (at least it seems to be that way) that Allumeria is copying Minecraft. It is a bad precedent to say Allumeria is copying Minecraft (not just for Allumeria but a lot of Minecraft “clones” because the blocky style limits quite a lot of what you can artistically do) and it would be a bad precedent to say openTTD assets were copying original TTD assets, because that could be grounds for copyright which could lead to openTTD assets having to be scrapped.

    • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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      3 hours ago

      Im old enough remembering when terraria was called “2D minecraft”. Its all pointless arguments.

      • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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        2 hours ago

        Just because people say stupid shit doesn’t mean we should ignore it. I personally know people who ignored Terraria specifically because of that stupid comparison. Some of those people ended up enjoying Terraria after giving it a chance. I think such stupid arguments deserve pushback because they just end up hurting the game they’re about.