Microsoft owns cubes and birches, didn't you know?
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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I'd like to know what Steam has to say on the matter. They are usually one of the more reasonable software companies.
It does not matter that this is a Minecraft clone, there are hundreds of them and mojang has always been fine with them.
Minecraft itself is inspired and started as a clone of infiniminer.
The general rule has always been “as long as it does not use assets or code made by mojang” its fine and they wont care or sue.
Unless this tree is using a stolen texture from the game there is nothing that makes this more illegal then the thousands of cloned already out there.
Of course a doubt microsoft would respect such, they shown their hands when they presumed ownership over the now open sourced end poem.
Generally in copyright law, it's applied when a lay person can or does misconstrue the new product for the old one.
Like if you look at something and think it's the other one, that is copyright infringing.
I have no doubt that in law and the wealth of microsoft to argue in court that could indeed do that.
But my point is that there was an established public agreement with mojang. It could be raised as a legal defence that you where given permission pre-microsoft.
And also that this law is dumb as fuck.
Here is a screenshot of infiniminer (2009)
You could show that to people and they would say it looks like minecraft,
If infiniminer has sued during the minecraft browser version days it would never even have gotten the chance to become what it is now.
Oh yeah, for sure, by no means was what I said in dissent in any way to what you said. More of an aside or tidbit.
The fact that they had an... established public agreement is just even more messed up when companies arbitrarily decide "nope, we're gonna fuck you in the ass suddenly now". Sometimes, companies even have explicit public agreements to or not do stuff. So when this type of thing happens against previous understanding for said company's self interest and they just happen to have more money than you do to back up what may even be a court case in your favor, but it would otherwise bankrupt you, it really paints a certain picture.
It's the Microslop way.
They have an AI tool that scrapes everything on the Internet until it finds copyright violations. The entire and only job of humans in this process is to press the big "C&D" button, so the barrier is just much too low, allowing for stuff like this to happen accidentally.
There should be a serious consequence for false DMCA claims. There has to be a deterrent. YouTube is already completely fucked by UMG. I wanna see them go out of business because of all their false claims.
There actually is supposed to be one, just nobody bothers to enforce it.
Fuck copyright and patent laws and the morons/scumbags who support them.
I'm not saying it's all sunshine and rainbows in copyright land, but you essentially can't develop drugs without some kind of patent law.
Sure you can. People richer than us will just make less profit.
The issue is with what drug R&D looks like. You invent some new compound you think will treat X because it has a similar structure to other compounds that treat X. Now you need a decade or so of trials to prove that it actually treats X, that it doesn't have side effects too severe to stop people from taking it for X, that it doesn't also silently cause some kind of obscure cancer, and then it might get approved (and if it doesn't that manpower and money was wasted) and the exclusivity time granted by your patent is how you turn a net profit from the last ten years of work because it's much easier for another company to spin up a factory making X than it is to get X approved in the first place so anyone else making the drug can charge less to cover their much lower costs in getting it to market and will eat the lunch you spent the last decade+ cooking.
Unless you intend for medical R&D to be done purely under public funding, which is an entirely different scenario than just "no patent law."
all because of a screenshot of birch trees
Worth noting, that image was given as an example of how the game looks similar to Minecraft. It was not the basis of the complaint. Microsoft also claimed the gameplay is stolen as well, according to Valve. So it's definitely not about the trees themselves.
This Reddit post has the actual email from Valve to the dev.
I think this is definitely not a fight Microsoft can win (without a war of attrition I mean), and they seem to agree because they revoked the complaint by now. But there's other blocks not featured on this image that would make a much stronger case imo. Stone bricks and planks look identical imo and definitely can be made unique looking if the dev wanted to.
Gameplay can be copied just fine, anyway. In fact, most games are just copying the gameplay of something else (not least of which are the THOUSANDS of Minecraft clones that play the same, but have their own aesthetic). This game looks exactly like Minecraft, tho, and it could very easily be confused for Minecraft. That is going to be more damning for the dev than the mechanics.
Of course. I was just bringing it up as a supporting argument to why the DMCA isn't specifically about that image or the trees on it.
But yeah, gameplay isn't protected by copyright, so that argument from microsoft is just bogus.
Is there a legal precedent on how copyright can be used against game clones?
I know that there is for board games, and there it says that the art and the rulebook cannot be identical, but that game rules aren't protectable. So it's basically the same level of protection that e.g. a painting would have.
If the same thing holds true for video games, then "The gameplay being similar" shouldn't matter at all, and the only question is whether the art is too similar.
Considering that the art for voxel games is limited by technicalities (1m size blocks are required by the gameplay) and the low-resolution texture art style, I would naively guess that there's not much room for differentiation and thus unless the textures are actual 1:1 copies of minecraft textures, there's not much that can be done there either.
There aren't a lot of ways you can draw a low-resolution square birch texture.
(1m size blocks are required by the gameplay)
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?
Digging, if you don't care about accuracy, can be done with smaller blocks.
Building not. Try building a nice house, but when you try to place blocks you get a burb of tiny blocks being strewn all over.
Look at what people are actually doing in Minecraft. Terraria is a completely different game, especially in regards to this mechanic and the gameplay surrounding this mechanic.
Also, for a 2D game, halving the block size means you quadruple the amount of blocks. For a 3D game it's 8x.
2D and 3D are vastly different and stuff that works in 2D often doesn't work in 3D or vice-versa.
For example, try to make a 2D first-person shooter. Or an RTS where units can freely move in 3D. Even something as simple as Chess completely falls apart when you introduce a 3D playing field.
(Goes without saying, this is about 2D/3D gameplay, not 2D/3D graphics. Every physical chess set has 3D graphics, but they also all have 2D gameplay.)
Building not. Try building a nice house, but when you try to place blocks you get a burb of tiny blocks being strewn all over.
... so Vintage Story doesn't exist, and neither does its axis-aligned voxel placement when chiseling?
Terraria is a completely different game
You can still build things in it, I don't see how that's relevant to the topic of 1m blocks being a hard requirement.
Also, for a 2D game, halving the block size means you quadruple the amount of blocks. For a 3D game it’s 8x.
You don't need to divide voxels by powers of two, Terraria and Starbound have roughly 2x3 player hitboxes - which would translate to 2x3x2 hitboxes in 3D spaces.
[...] Or an RTS where units can freely move in 3D
Homeworld fans, back me up
IANAL, and this is oversimplifying. Copyright protects the creative elements of a game, including the specific way that a game is coded (so you cannot decompile a game, modify all the art assets, change the code a little, and then sell it), and possibly aspects of the gameplay required to give it a specific "feel".
If you want a solid legal defense for cloning, you could have one team that describes the original game in a way that removes the creative elements, and a second team that works from that description to make a new work. This works for other works, too; I can write my own "book about an orphan that learns he has magical powers, goes to a school to learn to use those, and ultimately battles and defeats the powerful dark wizard that killed his parents", but can't sit down following the story elements of Harry Potter for my new Barry Cotter book series.
Ultimately the line is what you can convince a judge and/or jury is "different enough".
The gameplay being too similar is a bogus argument Microsoft's AI probably snuck in there. I mentioned it to support my point that the DMCA complaint isn't about the birch trees specifically, but that's definitely not an argument that would have worked out legally for Microsoft.
Patents could work out, like for Nintendo in the Palworld case. But DMCA is a copyright dispute, patent law doesn't apply here. And who knows if they even have any relevant patents to accuse this game of violating.
Wait until they figure out hytale released a similar looking game
That's what they're doing here. They can go after a smaller studio gain precedent then go after the larger Giants like hytail which is owned by riot. They need some legal ground first to do that.
riot bought hytale but then sold it, it's no longer theirs
this is almost certainly an ai tool run amok, not a deliberate attempt to stomp on the little guy.
Oh i missed that bit of news. I'm glad the original owners have control of that!!
Microsoft, evidently related to Minecraft
Bruh, they've owned it for like a decade at this point. Even if someone was wholly unaware of Minecraft, it would be one of the first things to come up on a cursory search of the game.
The DMCA claim was evidently related to the Minecraft IP. It's not suggesting that Minecraft is unrelated to Microsoft.
I watched a video about this and the game does look strikingly similar in every biome and mechanic. There are seed-based voxel games that manage to do things differently like Valheim. However, I found it ironic that they did not sue Hytale yet.
Sniff It smells like birch up in here.
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