Someone at SEGA doesn’t seem to understand how the Internet works!

So Yakuza 7 (Japan got the game with this number, so it makes sense to call it as such) changed the gameplay up a bit with its RPG elements, and it’s also available on PC. But don’t bother looking for it on Steam Database, or SteamDB for short. This third-party, not-related-to-Valve website shows the number of players, the update history, and much more, so it’s a quite useful database. But Yakuza: Like A Dragon is not there.

This isn’t Photoshop below: you can see it for yourself. „This page was taken down because SEGA is claiming we distribute their game here (we don’t),” the page reads. Pavel Djundik, the creator of SteamDB, explained the story on Twitter: „Can anyone help to get in touch with SEGA? Their lawyers are trying to take down Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s SteamDB page claiming that we distribute the game. I took the page down because they did not reply to the first abuse report and sent a new one to our hoster.

SteamDB does not support piracy, it does not provide downloads, it does not sell keys, it does not link to any websites that do any of these activities. SteamDB gets at least one DMCA per year, but we were always able to quickly resolve it. SEGA on the other hand just ignored any replies. We’ve got in touch with someone at SEGA of America and it is being looked into. Thanks for your support everyone, it is truly amazing to see that my hobby (!) project is useful to so many people,” Djundik wrote.

Cloudflare, their host, sent the email on the 19th that they got on the 12th, and it’s a pretty basic message: „Original Work: Sega creates copyrighted software and game programs which can be found at [SEGA’s website.” They replied on the email address provided, but instead of a reason, they got a DMCA notice sent to their host. Even though SteamDB uses Steam widgets to purchase the games from Valve’s digital store!

So in short: someone in SEGA’s Japanese offices doesn’t seem to understand that SteamDB is a completely harmless website, and SEGA’s American office has to help the page in an issue that shouldn’t even exist. The funniest thing in it all is that SEGA was the top-rated publisher on Metacritic in 2020…

Source: PCGamer