Related to a night club level added in an update
First-person tactical shooter Ready Or Not disappeared from Steam on June 16th, prompting a flurry of rumours as to why. Now it’s back and the developers say that the removal was because a “takedown request was issued via Steam concerning a suggested trademark infringement in our recent Night Club map.”
Let’s start at the beginning. In an update released on June 12th, New Zealand-based developers Void Interactive added a finished version of a night club map to Ready Or Not, among other changes. Then on June 16th, both the game and its store pages disappeared, meaning owners couldn’t continue playing it.
The rumour spread quickly enough that Void Interactive released a statement explaining the removal on Twitter:
pic.twitter.com/yIM99niPZX
“We’d like to address the rumors surrounding the takedown of Ready Or Not and its associated pages on Steam that occurred on Thursday, June 16th,” begins the statement.
“A takedown request was issued via Steam concerning a suggested trademark infringement in our recent Night Club map that was shared as part of our most recent Steam update. We take IP concerns very seriously, and in a show of good faith, we have decided to remove the subject materials and any reference to them from Ready Or Not and from any of our social media or other publications.”
The statement doesn’t say who made the claim of infringement, but comments from players on Twitter suggest that the in-game night club used a name similar to that of a real night club chain in the UK.
Now that Ready Or Not is back on Steam, the infringing content has presumably been removed, although developer videos of the update remain offline until they can be edited. You can still find details of the update’s other new additionsin the Steam patch notes post from the 12th.
