Things are not looking good for indie team Spiral Games. Activision has filed a DMCA claim and has taken down ORION from Steam. According to the DMCA claim, ORION used weapon art content from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, which is why Activision.

Going into more details, Activision claimed that ORION used – among other weapons – the following ones: the M8A7 rifle, the Haymaker rifle, and the Bal-27 rifle.

Trek Industries provided a comparison in order to prove that ORION did not use assets from Activision’s titles.

Trek Industries had this to say about Activision’s DMCA claim:

“This is extremely serious that a DCMA request has removed our entire game from sale, during the biggest sale event of the year. Apparently no cross-checking was done by our Partner, who we’ve been with for over 5 years and I have seen better and would expect better from them. At minimum, to contact us regarding our assets/defense before taking any action.”

However, Reddit’s member ‘Some_MelonCat‘ has provided some new comparison screenshots in which we can see the similarities between ORION’s and Call of Duty’s weapons.

It’s worth noting that Activision is willing to remove its DMCA claim once Spiral Studios removes all the infringing weapon assets.

It will be interesting to see what Spiral Games will actually do. If it decides to create some new content in order to avoid this DMCA claim, it will be critizised and this whole thing will have an impact on its image and status. And while some will claim that there are some differences in these weapon designs, and that a company can’t really file such a DMCA claim for weapons (for example, a lot of AK47s are similar in a number of games), it seems – at least for now – unlikely for Spiral Games to win this battle.