In January, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their lo-fi voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest, an exciting milestone after a year of development. Two weeks later, the game is no longer available on Steam as the result of a DMCA takedown from Microsoft, claiming that Allumeria infringes on Minecraft’s copyright.
“I genuinely do not know what to do,” Unomelon posted in the game’s Discord.
Allumeria certainly does look quite a bit like Minecraft—the inspiration is obvious. But it’s far from the first procedurally generated game to riff on Minecraft over the last decade, and Microsoft’s copyright claim cites a screenshot from Allumeria (above) alongside one from Minecraft without any specific similarities beyond using voxels.
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Another post from Unomelon in Discord suggests that the takedown may be the result of “an automated claiming service called Tracer.AI,” so it’s possible Allumeria just looked similar enough to falsely flag a machine learning algorithm. Valve will automatically take a game off Steam if a DMCA is issued against it, so this all could just be a bunch of robots reacting with little to no actual humans examining the circumstances.
Much as Allumeria really does resemble Minecraft, it’s always strange how certain games get a pass and others get stepped on. Hytale launched to great acclaim recently (not on Steam, however), and that looks a heck of a lot like Minecraft, too, but as far as I know, Microsoft hasn’t threatened any legal action.
And as noticed by Resetera, the developer of another Minecraft-like, Vintage Story (which is also not on Steam), has described the claim as “ridiculous” and called for an official statement from Mojang.
According to Valve, the developer of Allumeria can file a DMCA counter-notice. If Microsoft does not respond to this counter-notice with “legal proceedings” within 10 days, the game will be reinstated on Steam.
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