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The Steam Database (SteamDB) is widely known amongst PC users that frequently play games. It is a third-party service that provides information about games on Steam. For instance, here is the SteamDB page for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. You can see how many players are in game right now, you can see the Steam APP ID number, the developer, what platforms the game is available on, what DLC is available for the game, and even which packages the game is included in among many other useful pieces of information.
We have used SteamDB data here quite a few times in showing the player count trend of various games over time. It's a very useful service and it only uses information that is already available to be parsed through Steam itself.
Nowhere in SteamDB do they offer any place to download, acquire, or purchase anything at all. They merely parse information from Steam.
This is all fine and dandy, unless you're Sega. Sega recently sent a takedown notice to SteamDB to remove the SteamDB page for Yakuza: Like a Dragon. That page now says that it "was taken down because SEGA is claiming we distribute their game here (we don't)" and provides a link to a tweet with more information. That tweet is below.
Sega, and their lawyers claim that SteamDB distributes Yakuza: Like a Dragon through SteamDB. One of the two creators of SteamDB, Pavel Djundik, attempted to get in contact with Sega after the first notice. They heard no reply. Instead, a second notice was sent to SteamDB's host at CloudFlare. CloudFlare than passed that second notice along to Djundik who was forced to take action.
"We replied to the e-mail address that sent it to Cloudflare asking for clarification (because that is a very generic sentence) and explained that SteamDB doesn't actually sell or provide any game downloads. Apparently they ignored said e-mail because today we got a longer and more serious DMCA notice that went out to our host directly."
Hopefully Sega realizes the error of their ways and fixes this issue before it snowballs further.
