Last month the niche city builder Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic had a hell of a time after a fan went rogue and had the game’s website and Steam store page taken down.
As we wrote on February 16 the fan, reportedly a lawyer, pulled every legal lever he could to harm the game and its developers:
In a post made by the game’s developers, Slovakian studio 3Division, it is claimed that a player, “once a respected member of our community”, has gone rogue and begun attacking the game’s online presence, attempting to have everything from trailers to the game’s website removed.
It is claimed that this player had written a guide for a way to play the game more realistically, and that even though the developers had already worked on a game mode that did just that, they had agreed to add him to the game’s credits as a goodwill gesture. gesture given his prominent place in society.
3Division says that this player, after being told they wouldn’t add to the credits until after this new mode was finalized and released, “began abusing YouTube’s reporting system by posting copyright violations to one of our most useful influencers”, and that as a result of this behavior they withdrew their offer to officially thank him.
Through a series of DMCA Claims he ended up taking down the game’s official site, reporting official YouTube videos belonging to developers 3Division, and eventually getting the game itself removed from Steam.
But per 4th of March the game is back. In a short post made on the recently restored Steam page for Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, “developer team” says:
Dear community and players,
We are happy to announce that our game is now back in the store!
We thank you for your patience, support and understanding as we navigated this difficult situation.
We would like to apologize to those who sought to purchase the game and were unable to. We realize that we underestimated the situation and it quickly escalated to a point that posed a threat to our game. We very much wish this had not been the case.
But we are now back on track and you can enjoy the game to the fullest! We are excited to get back fully into development and put the matter behind us.
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Cool! I played this game a while back, and while it’s not for everyone, everyone who hears “a city builder with a special focus on how city planning worked with the communist economies of Eastern Europe during the Cold War” and not immediately dusting – which i admit probably most sane people – should check it out, it does unbelievable niche stuff pretty good!