Myth of Empires has been removed from Steam following copyright infringement allegations

The multiplayer sandbox game Myth of Empires has been removed from Steam, reportedly following copyright infringement allegations for using another games source code.

While the exact reason for the DMCA takedown request has not been made public by any of the parties involved, a report by PC Gamer has indicated that the takedown request against Angela Game, developer of Myth of Empires, was filed by Studio Wildcard and Snail Games, the developer and publisher of Ark: Survival Evolved.

According to the takedown request, Angela Game was founded in 2020 by a former employee of Snail Games China, who had access to Ark: Survival Evolved’s source code. It’s suggested that this employee went on to use that source code when creating Myth of Empires. 

After Myth of Empires was released in November of 2021, Snail Games and Studio Wildcard grew “understandably concerned” at the similarities between the two games.

To confirm their suspicions, Studio Wildcard developers compared code headers in the Myth of Empires executable, in which they claim to have found hundreds of matching class, variable, and function names in a preliminary analysis.

With this analysis in hand, Studio Wildcard presented their findings to Valve who swiftly took action by removing Myth of Empires from their storefront, just two days after they were presented with evidence on December 3rd. 

In a statement released on the game’s website, Angela Game stated that “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, Angela Game continued. “We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused players. “