One of the hits of last week in the gaming world was NotGames’ little parody game NotGTAV, has just gone through a strange day.

The story starts earlier, when a DMCA takedown notice was filed against the game by someone who was thought to be from Rockstar. This led to NotGTAV being removed from Steam and NotGames receiving this e-mail from Valve:

Valve received a DMCA copyright take down notice about your NotGTAV game on Steam, at [infringing Steam Link].

 

[Name], on behalf of Rockstar Games, alleges that your game uses the Grand Theft Auto V acronym and title GTAV, and your game title infringes its copyright in http://store.steampowered.com/app/271590/.

 

As a result, we have unpublished your game from Steam.

Now as a parody game, NotGames knew that this could have been a problem. But as NotGames’ Emma Kendall said, “We made sure we’d taken all reasonable steps from our side to let them know what we were doing.” and the game itself was donating money to a British charity as well. Not to mention that the only GTA related thing used in the game was… well, just the name. Thus while the team worked on a rebrand Rockstar were contacted about this. And their reply?

They had nothing to do with the claim, nor did they know who had filed it.

Valve began an investigation into the DMCA claim being false, and this eventually led to the game being republished on Steam after a few hours due to Valve making the decision to treat the claimant as a false one. NotGames posted to the game’s Steam page with news of what had happened and the words “NotGTAV lives!!!!!!”

In typical NotGames’ fashion though they have taken the events in stride and while the game will now not be rebranded or changed, the rebrand’s new page and art design (“you may be able to tell it was done in a bit of a hurry”) as “NotDMCAV” will be up on the page for a few days because (in their own words) “gives us a huge giggle”.

Having had NotGames on our Indie Game Show in the past, it’s good to see that they’ve come through this with the game and their reputation unharmed. It does highlight though that like all copyright systems on the Internet, abuse of the system can happen and often seems to happen against those people who do the most good. As I said above, this game donates profits to a charity.

Hopefully Valve are looking into measures to prevent similar things happening. It’s good though that they managed to get the mess cleared up and solved fairly quickly though.