Unomelon, the developer of Minecraft-inspired sandbox game Allumeria, says a DMCA from Microsoft, evidently related to Minecraft, got the game removed from Steam.
“The Allumeria Steam page is currently down because Microsoft has filed a false DMCA claim on it,” Unomelon said on Bluesky on Tuesday. “They sent an email earlier today claiming that this screenshot infringes on their copyright. I am taking a moment to figure out what my path is going forward, will update soon.”
The screenshot in question (above) is a simple wide shot of a forest filled with birch trees, what look to be oak trees with green and autumnal leaves, and a few pumpkins and weeds checkering the grassy dirt. There are definitely some similarities to Minecraft; if you told me this was a screenshot of a Minecraft mod, I’d probably believe you, but that’s true of many voxel-based games, including Hytale.
I’m not arguing about whether the copyright claim is legit. I’m saying that claiming the picture in the post doesn’t look like MC is a questionable opinion at best.
Which is an irrelevant point because it’s a singular image, and one that is depicting only nature which by nature (pun wasn’t intended) is generic. And to prove my point what is the first game that comes to mind when you see this image?
None in particular, but I don’t have experience with triple-A games enough to know about this artstyle
Well that’s pretty much my point. None come to mind because it could be any game with a “realistic” forest. The same way you could take a forest photo in a random block style game and it could come out looking like Minecraft. One nature image from one game looking like a nature image from a different game doesn’t mean anything.
I get your point, but there are some pretty specific similarities, notably:
All of which are featured prominently in the screenshot. There are differences-- taller trees, more small vegetation, different grass block color variation, colored and differently-modeled leaves-- but it’s more similar than other voxel-based games I’m familiar with. Maybe I don’t play many mc-likes, but other voxel games like Fractal Block World, Teardown, that foresty one with the tiny voxels (forgot the name), Lucid Blocks (the other voxel game by this same creator(!!) about a liminal world), and even Hypixel have more notable differences than this screenshot does. Maybe there’s more to the game that’s different, but this particular screenshot looks like lightly modded MC.
You do realize every specific similarity you brought up also applies to Hytale and Vintage story (except for the pumpkin part because in Vintage story they don’t grow in the wild). Could it be that there’s a completely different reason those similarities exists?
Perhaps grass texture with the side showing dirt just looks visually more appealing than an entirely grassy block? Pretty much every minecraft-like game does this. Even Terraria does the same thing in a 2D space.
As for pumpkins and trees. Pumpkins in the real world also grow in groups. If we consider the fact that the pumpkin has to be a cube there’s nothing specific about it growing in the forest in clumps, that’s just imitating the real world. Similar thing with trees. Most trees also grow from a single trunk that’s sprawls wide at the top. That’s just how trees are.
And what even is “minecraft-like” terrain generation? I’m pretty sure Minecraft has gone through at least 3 different variations of world generation. The latest version of Minecraft world gen looks nothing like what is generated in Allumeria, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the opposite because Minecraft latest world gen is very refined and Allumeria simply doesn’t have that level of refinement in its world gen. Allumeria world gen is closer to the alpha/beta version of Minecraft world gen.
What I’m getting at is that the specifics in that single image can be what make it look like it’s Minecraft, but there’s a reasonable explanation for all of those things and any resemblance ends up coincidental. It looking like Minecraft is just as coincidental as my picture looking like KCD.