Of all the things that could happen during the pandemic, this absolutely makes the least amount of sense. SEGA sent Steam Database, also known as SteamDB, a DMCA notice. Let’s go into detail on what SteamDB is. The site, at large, shows information pertaining to a video game.
The stats are so detailed you can go and see that on March 29th at 8PM EST (March 30th, Midnight UTC) 951 people playing it, and 1400 people watching Yaluza 0 on Twitch. It also go into details on what the game costs in your local currency, and if it’s on sale. Also you can get a glimpse into spoiler territory with the site announcing DLC before the developers do.
It is used by numerous streamers and content creators use it as a tool to see if a game is popular or not to make content with. “Why, William, did SEGA send a DMCA take down notice to a helpful site like SteamDB?” This is where it gets hilarious.
SEGA sent the DMCA notices because the site got flagged automatically by services that were created to do the job. SEGA’s robots claimed that the service was distributing Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which automatically sent out the notice to the site host on March 12th 2021. The complaint that was received by Cloudflare, eventually made its way to the site owner, Pavel Djundik, a week later. With a lack of human communication between Djundik and SEGA, it led him to remove the page entirely. As of March 31st, the page was reinstated with a statement from SEGA.
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.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon · AppID: 1235140 · SteamDB
The lack of communication might be because of the robots sent to do a human’s job. Let’s hope more sites in general pick up the mantel that SEGA and own up to their mistakes in the future.
