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.
They aren’t? There’s nothing that requires a voxel to represent a 1m cube. They could be 0.5m cubes, or even something exotic like spheres with a calculated surface stretching over them to smooth out the result. 1m cubes are just convenient and popularized by Minecraft.
Yes, they are required by that type of gameplay. 0.5m cubes mean that mining and placing blocks takes 8x as long. That is a massive change in the gameplay.
Can you do a voxel game where mining and building is extremely fiddly and everything is much more laboursome than with 1m blocks? Sure you can. Has been done. And it sucks.
You could also do a voxel game where mining and building is not extremely fiddly and nothing is much more laboursome than with 1m blocks.
Terraria, Starbound and many other similar games manage to do it in 2D by making you mine more than one block at a time, what makes it impossible in 3D spaces?