Myth of Empires, a survival strategy game that just launched into early access last month, has been removed from Steam after Valve received a DMCA takedown request from Studio Wildcard and Snail Games, the makers of Ark: Survival Evolved.
According to documents reviewed by PC Gamer, the takedown mentions suspicious similarities between Myth of Empires and Ark. In fact, Studio Wildcard "found hundreds of matching class, variable, and function names in a preliminary analysis" of Myth of Empires' code. Wildcard's analysis was presented to Valve on December 1, and Myth of Empires was removed from Steam's storefront on December 3.
The documents essentially accuse Myth of Empires dev Angela Game of stealing Ark's source code. Angela Game was founded in 2020 by a former Snail Games China employee, which is the parent company of Studio Wildcard. That employee had access to Ark's source code, which Wildcard says was used to create Myth of Empires.
Apparently the evidence was strong enough for Valve to take Myth of Empires off its storefront to avoid liability, although the game remains accessible by the tens of thousands of players who have already purchased it.
Angela Game denied the accusation in a blog update on December 7. "Our development team solemnly declares: Angela Game fully owns all rights and property associated with Myth of Empires and will actively respond to any doubts or allegations on this point. We are in active contact with Steam and are doing our best to restore the game to their store."
Myth of Empires will continue its normal development and operations while Angela remains in contact with Valve to restore the game to the Steam storefront.
It’s not just game developers that need to be worried about having their game hijacked. Ward B found out that they even need to be concerned with real-life weapon manufacturers trying to steal their in-game gun design. You can read all about how Russian arms manufacturer Kalashnikov stole Ward B’s shotgun here.