Will Sony ever release a remake or remaster of Bloodborne, the Dark Souls successor that became one of our favorite games of 2015? Even Sony’s former games chief isn’t sure — but that isn’t stopping Sony’s copyright enforcers from shutting down fun in the meanwhile. Last week, it axed the 60fps mod that let the game finally run smoothly, and now it’s killed the fan-made “Bloodborne PSX” demake that reimagined Bloodborne as a block game for the original 1995 PlayStation.
Here’s a copy of the copyright takedown notice for posterity; it claims that Walther is engaging in “digital piracy.”
It’s not surprising that Sony wouldn’t want Walther to promote her work using its copyrighted names, and the company’s almost certainly within its rights to wait a few years before doing so. What’s surprising is that Sony needed an enforcer in the first place; Walther was happy to change her other “Bloodborne Kart” game to “Nightmare Kart” after Sony simply reached out and asked her.
But maybe that’s because MarkScan is playing whack-a-mole on Sony’s behalf. MarkScan was also the one behind the Bloodborne 60fps mod takedown, says mod creator Lance McDonald, and it also took down one of Walther’s YouTube videos about Bloodborne PSX with a copyright claim.
MarkScan submits millions upon millions of URL takedown requests on behalf of Sony, Amazon, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Novi Digital Entertainment and more, according to a Google transparency report; Google winds up removing around 47 percent of them.
Why go after these videos now? That’s what I’d like to know. Sony did get our hopes up by putting Bloodborne at the very end of its 30th Anniversary thank-you video in December with the words “It’s about persistence” — could it be a coded message to fans that they need to keep on waiting?
Here’s hoping this isn’t the beginning of a “demake” purge, as they’re a delightful and creative way to remix games; I doubt they substantially reduce the demand for true remakes.