Games Workshop had a Warhammer FTL clone pulled from Steam over some overly Space Marine-esque shoulderpads

Last year I covered the demo for Void War, robotically describing it as FTL meets Warhammer 40,000, because that is what it is, and sometimes, you have to call a Spade Marine a Spade Marine (I did enjoy the demo, as flagrantly combinatory as the game may be).

Void War’s art direction has apparently proven a little too familiar in places for Games Workshop’s liking. Developers Tundra Interactive report that the Warhammer publisher issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice earlier this year, which led to their game being temporarily removed from Steam.

Initially, it was thought that the DMCA notice was a nonsense claim similar to that levelled at No Players Online, the DMCA system being perilously easy to abuse. It was issued by somebody called Mal Reynolds, and Mal Reynolds is also the name of Nathan Fillion’s character in Firefly. Suspicious indeed. Tundra have now spoken with Games Workshop, however, and confirmed the claim’s authenticity, though they’ve yet to clear up the implication here that interplanetary gunslinger Mal Reynolds is secretly a copyright lawyer.

According to the developers, Games Workshop’s inquisitors were particularly irked by the design of some shoulderpads in one of the featured trailers, referred to in correspondence as “oversized convex shoulder pads with a metallic rim”. Find a screen of the armour at stake in the vicinity of this paragraph. Tundra insist that those convex shoulderpads are all their own work, but say they’ve removed the trailer anyway to avoid disruption.

“All of the artwork in the trailer is original work created by our artists,” reads a statement to IGN. “While we disagree with their assessment, the simplest way to get the game back up and avoid getting bogged down in DMCA process was to remove that trailer and move on. We may re-upload an updated version later after we find time to adjust that shot, but for now our priority is shipping content and finishing multi-language font support so we can finally deliver proper translations.”

As ever with these things, it is possible to decry how companies with massive legal teams slice the ankles of smaller independent developers, while also acknowledging that the game in question is a screaming rip-off, however entertaining.

That aside, I could absolutely imagine Warhammer 40,000’s Imperium launching a crusade in response to copyright infringement. Those Chaos Space Marines are naught but tepid plagiarists. You can’t just glue some novelty Halloween fingers and a rug to your Primarch armour and say you’ve invented the wheel, Horus! Nathon Fillion is on his way over with a subpoena.