Orion Project under fire
Steam has been in an uproar this week over a game called The Orion Project, which was issued a DMCA claim from Activision. Trek Industry developer David Prassel alleges that the publisher had no right to do so, and that his game was removed from Steam with “no warning,” and that he did nothing wrong. That has the potential to go real south real quick, and he created a campaign to build off this supposed injustice.
But while everyone seemed to err on the side of Prassel, more information came to light over time that didn’t necessarily help his cause. As a few members of the community have pointed out, several weapons do look very close to Call of Duty guns, if not exactly the same. Take this example here — you can clearly see that (among other examples) they were allegedly lifted from Black Ops III. Now, it’s Trek’s word against Activision, with the former stating that big publishers are trying to keep indies down (and possibly preying on that narrative), while trying to stomp out allegations that they mismanaged the company in the past, stole assets previously, or re-released their own game (Dino Beatdown into Dino Horde) to avoid bad ratings and reviews.
Either way it’s a mess, but there’s enough information out there for you to make a judgment on it. We’ve reached out to both parties for comment. Since I assume Prassel is reading this, please note the use of the phrase “alleged.”
