FTL-like Void War was DMCAed by Games Workshop due to ‘oversized convex shoulder pads with a metallic rim’

Void War is an FTL-like, a space strategy sim of the roguelike variety, but it’s hard to get a whole sentence into any description of it without pointing out that, boy howdy, it sure does look like Warhammer 40,000. Which Games Workshop apparently noticed, because developer Tundra Interactive received a DMCA notice once Void War was published on Steam.

As they told IGN, matters were confused by the fact the email from Games Workshop’s public infringements department was signed “Mal Reynolds”, which is the name of a character from Firefly. At first, the developers thought it was the work of a copyright troll. But no, sometimes there are real people in the real world who have the same names as people in fiction—spare a thought for Australian news reporter Harry Potter—and the email was legit.

With that confirmed, Tundra took the game down and asked what specifically could be changed to get it back up: “[Games Workshop] said their concern was limited to a specific shot from one of the trailers on the store page, arguing that certain elements could create the mistaken impression that Void War is associated with Games Workshop, specifically what they described as ‘the oversized convex shoulder pads with a metallic rim.’

“All of the artwork in the trailer is original work created by our artists. While we disagree with their assessment, the simplest way to get the game back up and avoid getting bogged down in DMCA process was to remove that trailer and move on.”

Void War is back on Steam, with one less trailer. While oversized shoulder pads are a common enough feature of power-armored videogame characters everywhere from Fallout to Starcraft, the image in question is so clearly a Chaos Space Marine from Warhammer 40,000 that when I put it in Google Lens image-search, it suggested a link to an official Warhammer Community post on the evolution of Chaos Space Marine art over the years. The backpack in particular couldn’t be more Warhammer if it was dipping a brush in Nuln Oil while listening to a Dan Abnett audiobook.

Of course, Warhammer 40,000 isn’t a particularly original work. It draws inspiration from Dune, Aliens, 2000 AD, Predator, Catholicism, and various other works of science-fiction and fantasy. But that’s not the same as transparently borrowing the entire identity of one existing setting and bolting it to the gameplay of another game that already exists—though to be fair, Void War does add a variety of quality-of-life improvements and tweaks to the FTL formula. It’s got a demo you can download if you want to check it out for yourself.