Usually a the big music corporations accuse people downloading music thieves and such. I want to present you a different story with reversed roles.
Payday is a game a bit similar to Left 4 Dead 2. It includes 4 players, a lot of guns and plenty targets to shoot. The object of the game is not to shoot zombies, but to make big buck heists, bank jobs, HVT extraction, and stuff like that. All in all, very nice game (the sequel, Payday 2 has been released and it is doing great).
I originally bought the game when I saw the kick-ass trailer for it on Youtube. Apparently the music for the trailer was at least partly composed by Rob F. Blom. Blom was also the man behind the old Main theme and old Load-out music. So, I bought the game through Steam and lived happily ever after. That is, until some unfortunate events happened.
Everything was good until around 21th of August 2012. A new patch was available for the game, and Steam updated it automatically. I was devastated to notice that the two aforementioned beautiful music tracks were replaced with far worse versions. I wasn’t the only one to notice, there were a lot of threads on Steam forums about the issue. It turned out that Overkill Software did not have the necessary copyrights for the songs in the first place.
I consider this a scandal of sorts. How didn’t the publisher, being the infamous Sony Online Entertainment, catch the copyright problems early on? How is this possible? The original tracks were part of the game for 9 months!
What’s even more disturbing is the use of the Steam to censor out the the tracks in question. It is supposed to be a content delivery platform, not content take away platform. I have earlier been a big Steam fan, but not that much anymore. It seems that it would be basically possible to kill-switch Steam-managed content from users’ computers at will. And this is very scary thing, trust me. Reminds me of the case where Amazon.com pulled the plug for a bunch of 1984 books from Kindle readers due to copyright dispute.
I tried to reach Sony and Rob F. Blom for comments, but after two weeks they hadn’t responsed to my emails and I decided to go ahead with this article.