Valve
Steam found a way to block a developer from releasing their own game using their own intellectual property.
Japanese indie developer Daikichi was getting ready to drop a demo for Wired Tokyo 2007, a climbing action game set above the Tokyo skyline, when Steam stopped them cold. The reason was a dinosaur card game that Daikichi had included as a fun Easter egg in the game’s environment, one that Steam had flagged as belonging to someone else entirely. But as it turns out, that someone else was Daikichi themselves.
Steam blocked this developer’s game for using their own creations
Steam told Daikichi that Dinostone, which shows up on surfaces in the game’s environment, looked like it belonged to a third party and that they needed proof it did not. The fix, according to Steam, was simple: get a lawyer to write a letter confirming they owned it. Without that, Steam said the demo was not going anywhere.
The catch was that Daikichi had originally published Dinostone under a pseudonym rather than their real name, which meant there was no clean paper trail linking them to it. And hiring a lawyer to write an opinion letter is not cheap, especially for a solo indie developer working on a tight budget. “Where’s that kind of money supposed to come from with an indie game budget?” Daikichi wrote on X.
So they improvised. Daikichi wrote a document granting themselves permission to use their own work, signed it, and sent it back to Steam for review. Whether it worked was still unknown at the time of writing.
