Star Control: Origins pulled from Steam after DMCA takedown

There's been a long-running dispute over the Star Control series of games and things have taken a significant turn. The original designers of the game, Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford, have issued a DMCA takedown of Star Control: Origins, which is a reboot of the franchise developed by Stardock. This has resulted in the game being removed from Steam and GOG.

PC Gamer reported the takedown, noting at the time that removal from the GOG marketplace was expected. Currently, the base game has been removed while the original soundtrack, season pass, and DLC are all still available. Those who already own the game on both platforms should be able to play with no problems.

Here's an excerpt from the Steam post published by the Stardock team, which also included a link to the full story of this dispute:

As some of you may know, there is a legal dispute between Stardock and Reiche and Ford regarding the trademarks and copyrights pertaining to Star Control.

Unfortunately, rather than relying on the legal system to resolve this, they have chosen to bypass it by issuing vague DMCA take-down notices to Steam and GOG (who, btw, Reiche and Ford are suing using GoFundMe money).

Steam and GOG both have a policy of taking down content that receive DMCA notices regardless of the merits of the claims.

We attempted to get a preliminary art injunction to prevent them from issuing more false DMCA take down notices. Unfortunately, the court ruled that it wasn’t the courts place to intervene in the area of DMCAs. Thus, here we are.

To my knowledge, never in the history of our industry has anyone attempted to use the DMCA system to take down a shipping game before. For example, when PubG sued Fortnite for copyright infringement, they didn't try to take Fortnite down with a DMCA notice.

For those not familiar with copyright law, you CANNOT copyright ideas, individual or short phrases, concepts, mechanics, game designs, etc.

Star Control: Origins is our own creation without relying on the work of Reiche or Ford. We spent 5 years working on it making it our own game. It very much plays like you would expect a Star Control game. But that has nothing to do with copyright. It has its own story, setting, plot, and all new characters. It exists in an entirely new universe.

Reiche and Ford chronicle their perspective on their own website, including the rejected proposal from them that included these bullet points:

Both sides agree not to interfere with each other’s new game development moving forward.
Both sides agree to contribute SCI, SCII and SC3 to the Ur-Quan Masters open source project for non-commercial use and to stop selling the games through any channels.
Both side agree not to “pass off” or “free ride” on the other’s good will or reputation.
Fred and Paul won’t infringe on the Star Dock’s trademark and Stardock won’t infringe on Fred and Paul’s copyrights.
Fred and Paul won’t challenge Stardock’s trademark registrations for “Star Control” and Stardock will withdraw their recent trademark applications for the “Ur-Quan Masters”, “Super Melee” and other various alien races from the classic games.
Both sides do their best to avoid confusion as to the origins of their respective new games.
Both sides will publish an agreeable statement explaining the settlement.
Neither side will disparage the other.
Each side will pay their own expenses and attorney’s fees.
Either side may disclose the final settlement agreement to anyone.

There's no statement from Reiche and Ford on the most recent developments in this Star Control dispute with Stardock. Stay tuned to Shacknews for additional updates.