Bethesda DMCAs Its Official Twitter Account Trying To Stop ‘Redfall’ Leaks

We're getting into the warmer seasons, which means AAA games are coming up for release dates. It also means that leaks of content, or sometimes the entire games, for those AAA games are coming out as well. We just talked about several leaks coming out for Nintendo's latest Zelda title. And now, right on the cusp of Bethesda's release of the much anticipated Redfall, the publisher is very busy trying to nuke every bit of leaked content it can sniff out on the internet. Including, briefly, images of Redfall appearing on its own official Twitter account.

Eager to prevent leaks from making it out into the world with only a few hours to go until launch, Bethesda is being extra vigilant, issuing takedown and copyright strikes wherever unapproved Redfall images and footage might pop up. Perhaps a little too vigilant actually, as the studio managed to copyright strike itself.

Both GamePitt and PMS Jordan shared screenshots of the evidence, which showed Redfall's Twitter account with the banner image removed. Not just removed, which has been happening for no reason to a lot of people since Twitter started to crumble beneath our virtual feet, but replaced with a grey rectangle. On it, a message reads The image has been removed in response to a report from the copyright holder".

Policing copyrights is hard! So hard, in fact, that sometimes you pull the trigger on your DMCA gun only to find that you had it pointed at your own head.

While this certainly does cause me to wonder aloud whether there were other mistakes made in the DMCA blitz Bethesda has undertaken, in particular the potential for the blitz to have caught up instances that would qualify as fair use, it also makes me wonder just how useful these anti-leak campaigns really are. A good portion of this content that is being taken down are images and the like that most publishers, likely including Bethesda, wouldn't give a flying damn about post-release. Given everything else going on publicly with this particular game, is attempting to bottle up leaks on the internet really anyone's best use of time?

Not only does it have a very small and crowded window in which to operate, but Redfall's build-up to launch has also been plagued with backlash. Gamers have taken issue with its always-online requirement, the inclusion of Denuvo DRM, and an FPS cap on consoles.

If nothing else, I'll have to thank Bethesda for making this game in such a way that it will almost certainly give me other future posts in which to write about it.