Steam Brulee: Cenokga Entertainment and Copyright Abuse


Time to put the torch to another dirty developer.

If MMO Fallout was dedicated to indie devs acting in devious ways, I would never have the time to go out and forage for fresh wild McDonald’s cheeseburgers. This Sunday of June 14, 2020 the year of Arnold, I want to take a moment to talk about the Cenokga Entertainment and how the spry, young, dashing, adventurous, up and coming, I’m out of adjectives, developer probably just took their career out back and brained it in the summer sun in public view for everyone to see.

What wasted potential.

Cenokga Entertainment popped up on my radar thanks to my soberly stumbling around Twitter today. For those not subscribed to Obscure Devs Quarterly, Cenokga are the folks behind the game Starclaw: Battle of StarSpace Nebula. Starclaw released on June 1 to the tune of universal disinterest because in space nobody can hear you say “meh.” Maybe it’s because the game looks like something you’d play on Newgrounds for free. Maybe it’s because of the ridiculous $20 asking price. Maybe it’s because the release fell on a Monday and people were too busy watching Jim Sterling’s new video.

Who knows? I do, but I’m not telling.

Key point here is that Starclaw has no reviews on Steam and probably for good reason. Where you can find a review is at Christ Centered Gamer (unarchived for their pleasure). and reviewer Cinque was not too happy about the state of things. I recommend reading the review for yourself and giving CCG a click, but the gist of it is that the game is low quality at a high cost.

A snippet:

“My experience was met with dull scenarios, tedious enemies, obnoxious bosses, literal game-breaking bugs, and absolutely nothing explained. I had to find out what most of the mechanics even did in the first place from pure trial and error because Starclaw sure didn’t want to do it for me and some of the choices made in the game mechanics are simply baffling.”

While achieving a high ‘morality score’ Starclaw received a devastatingly low 16% on quality. This is where Cenokga comes back in. Rather than taking the criticism like an adult, someone named Kyle decided to pen a response to the review. That response is here (archived for your pleasure) and it’s mostly a petulant and unprofessional rant about how Kyle is displeased with CCG not liking their game, mostly consisting of semantic arguments and ‘I personally think this mechanic is fine.’

My favorite part of the response is in regards to criticism of the control scheme, to which Kyle states “This whole paragraph is again, just a matter of opinion.” I have bad news for Kyle; reviews inherently are someone’s opinion.

Moving on;

“If you didn’t like the game or didn’t have even a shred of positivity to say about it, why did you even take the take to slander and insult my character, skills and the game? I didn’t force you to review it. You could have just ignored it.”

And here’s where we get to the heart of the issue; “if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything.” I’ll throw Kyle one better, “if you don’t want your mediocre $20 game to get criticized, don’t voluntarily send it to critics.” Nobody is going to line up to smooch your backside because you gave them the video game equivalent of a loaf of bread steeped in fetid sink water and said “but it’s free!” Cenokga thinks the review is defamatory, as everyone who ever couldn’t handle criticism would think. They don’t understand the definition of defamation.

There is literally not enough popcorn in my house to get through this.

But a developer acting like an entitled child over criticism isn’t new, nor would it warrant coverage on its own. Senokga decided to take the issue one step over the legal line by threatening to file a copyright takedown notice to Google. Emails to CCG have been published here.

Before I submit a Copyright Takedown notice to Google, I suggest you remove your defamatory review like I asked, before I seek other Takedown actions as well.

I can make a legal case out of this, since it’s not an actual “review.” Just someone rambling on about what they don’t like about the game, in an unfair way and using defamatory language. As I’m the full copyright owner, I can legally do that. The post doesn’t even make sense now, since any issues were fixed and my game design aspects were explained.

I would honestly like to know in what way that kind of conduct helps anyone?

Bad news; You can’t do that. Copyright law does not give you the right to take a review down because you don’t like the opinions expressed. Also the review doesn’t lose its legitimacy just because you think it’s unfair.

Cenokga has already broadcast their takedown publicly.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Even worse news; Copyright does not cover slander, and filing a copyright takedown over slander is an abuse of the copyright system. Filing a fraudulent DMCA notice however is a crime, one that carries the potential penalty of perjury should it be determined you were acting in bad faith.

For my own humor, I’d like point to this bit of legal lunacy.

“It is also the truth that I do have a case for slander and defamation of character here. As nothing was presented in a civil or constructive way.”

Their understanding of slander and defamation would be adorable if it wasn’t coming from such a malicious place, but slander and defamation are unrelated to being civil or constructive.

Someone should let Cenokga know that a growing list of developers have had their business dealings with Valve terminated and seen their company/games permanently banned from the Steam store for threatening critics with spurious legal action.

And to sum up with this perfectly timed tweet:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter. What I do have are a couple of emails sent out to third party entities that I will update upon receiving a response.