Sega Lawyers Threaten Wrong Website Over Yakuza Piracy [Update]

There are lawyers somewhere out there working for Sega HQ in Japan who have been tasked with hunting down the people responsible for pirating Yakuza: Like a Dragon. And they are not doing a good job.

UPDATE March 30: A Sega representative tells Kotaku “Earlier this week, one of our games was incorrectly flagged on SteamDB. We utilize anti-piracy software to protect our games at a large scale, but sometimes it makes mistakes. SEGA will continue to fine-tune these systems to avoid this in the future and we appreciate SteamDB cooperating with us to resolve the issue quickly.” Original story follows.

SteamDB, a website devoted entirely to recording statistics related to the Steam shopfront and multiplayer platform, has had to remove its page for Yakuza: Like a Dragon after pressure from Sega, who claim that the game itself was being illegally distributed from the page. Which it wasn’t.

Interestingly, site creator Djundik adds that, “SteamDB gets at least one DMCA per year, but we [are] always able to quickly resolve it,” likely because those DMCAs are the result of a busted/rogue internet search. Which may be the case here too, but unlike those other instances, “SEGA on the other hand just ignored any replies.”

And so if you wanted to check the stats on Like a Dragon at the moment, its page looks like this:

If Sega are taking recommendations, I know a lawyer who would have done a better job...