Blue Wizard Digital DMCA controversy

Recently, Jason Kapalka, co-founder of Blue Wizard Digital and creator of Shell Shockers, has been sending us (yolkbot) & other game modders DMCA takedowns for our work that modifies his game. As one of the most consistent and knowledgable modders, it hurts me to see this happening to us.

A DMCA takedown is a legal request to remove content that allegedly infringes on copyright. While the DMCA is an important tool for protecting intellectual property, it (by nature) has this idea of 'act now and ask questions later'. Unfortunately, this means that people can abuse the system to take down content they don't like, even if that content is legal.

yolkbot has been sent 3 DMCA takedowns from Jason Kapalka in the past year alone, despite none of the content he DMCA'd being infringing on his copyright. yolkbot's Github repository was DMCA'd twice, first in July 2025 and again in December 2025. Google also recieved takedowns to remove parts of yolkbot from search results.

In both cases, the takedowns were for content that allegedly circumvented digital protections Shell Shockers, a game created by Blue Wizard Digital. yolkbot filed valid counterclaims for both Github takedowns, with one being accepted and one pending (as on January 9th, 2026). Github, in both cases, said that they could not find valid evidence that there was infringement (as you can see at the top of each DMCA linked above).

2025-07-25-shell-shockers-2.md is the first DMCA sent to yolkbot on Github. Blue Wizard first identifies themselves as Blue Wizard Digital Ltd, which was disbanded in 2019. Blue Wizard then tries to claim “weapon and item statistics" are infringing in an circumvention claim. They use “minified/obfuscated” interchangeably, which simply demonstrates that the claimant doesn’t understand the clear differences. Shell Shockers, contrary to their claim, doesn't fingerprint devices with any hash or signature (or really anything at all). We can confirm this by viewing the utter lack of “fingerprints” existing anywhere in the Network tab of Chrome’s Developer Tools. They back up that this stops third parties from “obtaining unobfuscated source code”. This would make sense, yet they published the source code in an unobfuscated form on multiple occasions in the past - they published it and now they want to act as if they didn’t and remove the traces of it. They once again hallucinate functions “Bot.fire” and “Bot.moveTo”. The game is designed to queue actions on the server, meaning their ratelimits cannot actually be "defeated".

2025-12-16-shell-shockers.md is the newest claim to Github, and although shorter, it contains multiple lies. It claims that the WebAssembly binary (which the hash is incorrect of) implements ALL gameplay, physics, and anti-cheat measures. Unfortunately, gameplay and physics are performed on the Javascript side, which you can see as the JavaScript is 3.8 megabytes and the binary is 61 kilobytes: a noticeable difference. Despite going after one specific file, they claim that the entire repository is infringing. They also claim that the WebAssembly is obfuscated, once again demonstrating a misunderstanding of the word. A compiled WebAssembly is bytecode. Obfuscating bytecode is incredibly difficult, and it is also not present on the WebAssembly file. The hash actually differs because the hash they have isn’t the hash of their engine. They also made up a commit and claimed that it says “Yolkbot uses the original Shell Shockers wasm build for best performance”. This is incorrect for two reasons: (1) yolkbot’s internal style guides specify that yolkbot should be stylized as lowercase, no matter where it is in a sentence, including at the beginning and (2) the WebAssembly is ‘unperformant’ enough that Chromebooks crashed when trying to run it. They claim we disable ads, when advertisement logic is not present in the WebAssembly file. The same is true for ban logic: it’s just not there.

The various lies in these complaints, which have been verified to have been sent by Jason Kapalka himself, are simply astounding. Kapalka has shown a blatant disregard for the truth and for the legal process, and his actions have caused significant harm to yolkbot and other modders.