How A Shoulder Pad Landed FTL Meets Warhammer 40K In Steam DMCA Jail

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An indie game gets raked over the metaphorical coals over a split second in its Steam trailer. Remedy Entertainment gets a new boss. And the publisher of Arc Raiders might be involved in a new StarCraft shooter. It’s a very late edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news, rumors, and culture. Who’s ready to get into UncBall?

Void War is back on Steam after a dispute over shoulder pads

The Warhammer-inspired FTL mash-up was removed from Steam last month over a DMCA takedown request. Thought to possibly be someone trolling at the time, it turned out the 2025 strategy game was very much on the receiving end of Warhammer owner Games Workshop’s actual ire.

“After over a week of no response, Games Workshop eventually replied to our email and confirmed the notice was theirs,” developer Tundra told IGN in a statement. “They 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.'”

Tundra ended up pulling the trailer to make the whole thing go away and the game is back up on Steam. “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,” it wrote. What a great system Valve has for hashing out frivolous complaints!

The owner of Arc Raiders reportedly gets involved with StarCraft

Korean publisher Nexxon signed a cooperation agreement with Blizzard to help it develop a project in the StarCraft universe according to Dnews (via ResetEra). It was previously reported that Blizzard is working on bringing back StarCraft as an open-world first-person shooter. Maybe we’ll get an announcement or at least a tease for whatever this is at BlizzCon 2026.

Mewgenics fans go full cringe mode

Edmund McMillen and co-developer Tyler Glaiel asked players of the new roguelike to go act like kittens in public to win stuff online. They did exactly that.

Remedy Entertainment gets a new CEO

Jean-Charles Gaudechon will take the role on March 1 as the studio gets ready to launch Control 2 and hopefully, eventually, maybe tell people what’s up with the Max Payne remakes. He has creative director Sam Lake’s endorsement. “He very much understands our wildly unique vision and the value of the Remedy Connected Universe,” the Remedy veteran wrote.

Replaced gets a free demo

Players can now go hands-on with Sad Cat Studios’ long-awaited, retro-futurist, pixel-art action game on Xbox and PC for themselves starting February 11. The game has been delayed a bunch but comes to Game Pass on March 12.