Techland Bans Dying Light Mods, Slaps DMCA Mods With DMCA Claims

Techland, known widely as the developer of the popular "Dead Island" series of games, is no stranger to PR disasters. After running into trouble back in 2013 for a tasteless zombified female torso as part of a special edition version of "Dead Island: Riptide," the developer has run into more trouble – this time with its own fan base. The Poland-based developer has banned modifications for its newly launched game "Dying Light."

This puts the fans of the latest survival horror videogame on the PC platform in a quandary because the game had already spawned a fledgling modding scene barely days after its Jan. 27 launch, according to Cinema Blend. The way Techland went about imposing the ban is especially unsettling. The recent patch (version 1.2.1), which was released on Friday, adds the capability of allowing Techland to ban anyone caught modifying the game's data files. Worse yet, the developer has been proactive enough to slap the existing modders with DMCA notices, thereby forcing them to retract their mods.

The patch release includes a note: "blocked cheating by changing game’s data files," which points to the developer's original intent to maintain the game balance by dissuading cheaters. However, any evidence of that logic is shot down by the sorts of mods that were taken down by the company. This includes preventing the player from disabling shadows. This modification cannot affect gameplay, but it was used by gamers with modest PC configurations to improve performance.

Even benign visual mods such as the one that allowed players to deactivate the always-on film grain effect have gotten the axe. The "Dying Light" publisher Warner Bros has been going around issuing DMCA warnings to file hosting services such as Mediafire and TinyUpload to take down the mod created to switch off the film grain effect, according to Modvive.com.

The publisher has claimed that the mods infringe on their copyright. This is strange because most successful PC games have a thriving modification community, with companies such as Valve even actively encouraging the community and giving them a legitimate means to make money from their hobby. Techland's ham-handedness has irked off PC gamers and spawned threads on Reddit where fans have been decrying the move.

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Dying Light - CGI Trailer (credit: TechlandGames channel)