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Valve Takes Action Against Team Fortress 2, Portal Fan Projects After Years of Leniency (gamesradar.com) 32

Posted by BeauHD from the change-of-heart dept.
Dustin Bailey reports via GamesRadar: Valve has suddenly taken action against multiple fan games, stunning a fandom that had grown used to the company's freewheeling stance on unofficial community projects. One of those projects was Team Fortress: Source 2, an effort to bring the beloved multiplayer game back to life in a more modern engine using the S&box project. The project had already run into development difficulties and had essentially been on hiatus since September 2023, but now Valve has issued a DMCA takedown against it, effectively serving as the "nail in the coffin" for the project, as the devs explain on X. [...]

The other project is Portal 64, a demake of the 2009 puzzle game that ports it to run on an actual N64. Developer James Lambert had been working on the project for years, but it gained substantial notoriety this past December with the release of First Slice, a playable demo featuring the first 13 test chambers. It doesn't appear that Valve issued a formal DMCA against Portal 64, but the end result is the same. In a Patreon post (which was eventually made public on X), Lambert said he had "been in communication with Valve about the future of the project. There is some news and it isn't good. Because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, they have asked me to take the project down."

I'm not fully clear on what "proprietary libraries" means here, but it seems likely that Portal 64 was developed using some variation of Nintendo's official development tools for N64, which were never officially released to the public. Open-source alternatives to those tools do exist, but might not have been in use here. [...] Given Valve's historic acceptance of fan games, the moves have been pretty shocking to the community.
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Valve Takes Action Against Team Fortress 2, Portal Fan Projects After Years of Leniency More

Valve Takes Action Against Team Fortress 2, Portal Fan Projects After Years of Leniency

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  • So much for TF3... (Score:3)

    by JoeDuncan ( 874519 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @06:52PM (#64151395)
    ... now that Valve's totally jumped the shark :(

  • "How dare you port this game to a dead system..." (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Moryath ( 553296 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @06:55PM (#64151401)
    This is why copyright needs reforming. By the time most software reaches public domain, every possible system it was written for will be dead.

    • It's the same mindset Hollywood has where they believe that they're somehow losing cinema ticket sales because people are able to pirate a potato quality cam recording of a film. They just hate the idea that someone is getting their IP for free, even if what they're getting for free is a pixelated blocky mess.

      • I don't know, I think there might be something to the idea that people so desperate to see a movie they'd assault their eyes with a garbage cam rip rather than wait a couple weeks/months for a DVD or HD pirate copy to come out might very well pay.

  • Piss your fan base off, see where that gets you. Hoist the mainsail mates, it's time to go shark hunting.

  • Valve is asking me to stop supporting them and buying their games... Because attacking the open source, porting, modding, or gaming communities essentially tells me you are GREEDY BEYOND MEASURE, and that I should give you a NAP. (N_ever A_nother P_enny) Ok... Noted. I will obey. Nap time for valve.
    • Opensource doesn't mean you can just rip IP from others and publish it anyway you want. These people should have known better then to just copy and paste IP without written permission from Valve. It's no problem when you create it and keep it to yourself, as a learning project, but if you want to publish it, even for free, you better be sure you have permission. Valve is probably busy porting TF2 to their latest engine, just like they did with Counterstrike GO. You don't want to split the playerbase so both
      • You do NOT offhandedly support something for YEARS because its currently benefitting you in the PR department, then pull this BS. Its greed. Plain and simple. Split player base? Nonsense. You know as well as I do that ANYONE who is ANYONE playing valve games, essentially buys and has THEM ALL! This was greed. And inconvenient player created content being torpedoed by mega-corporations is BS no matter how you slice it. But you have fun fixing all the bugs and issues in a game or set of code, for free, as a g
        • My god another stupid rant about nothing. If their version with a newer, better engine was released, there was certainly a good reason why the userbase would split, especially because the new one would be free. I play valve games, but I don't have all of them, just as I know many people who haven't. And in regard to moneygrabbing, the game industry isn't different from amy other industry, it isn't anything special, it's just business, nothing more, nothing less. But hee, those people doing these conversions
          • "My god another stupid rant about nothing." = I don't have a good argument to what was said... Its ok... we noticed. That whole rant you jjust spat ouut was gobbledygook nonsense... Everything I said was valid. Grow up.
            • Hell no, everything you said was plain bullocks. Valve didn't support the conversion for years. And split playerbase is far from nonsense, it's a fact, you see it with a lot of games that get sequels amd then the playerbase for the previous game wanes off. This isn't about greed, this is about them needing to protect the trademark if they don't want to loose it. The makers of the conversion could have asked permission before starting their work, they didn't. Everybody knows that you need permission if you a
              • Says the greed loving corporatist... Everything YOU just said is absolute bulls_it. Greed did this. There was 100% no other motivator. Any other excuse is just that. A pitiful excuse. Not taking a project down for two years, until you have fresh IP coming out that it might damage the sales of = GREED! Your inability to spot GREED, likely means YOU are a GREEDY person. Now have a great Sunday, and go give away 20$... It'll make you feel good. Promise. ;-P

  • I get that Nintendo can complain, but:

    "Facepunch has not licensed any Valve assets for S@box. The unauthorized porting and redistributing of Valve's assets without a license violates Valve's IP."

    That's Valve-on-Valve crime. How dumb, they should take a cut on their store.

    Oh, well, I was going to pick up a card at Walmart but I'll skip it now. Not going to support that.

  • Not looking into details much (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cley Faye ( 1123605 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @07:53PM (#64151525) Homepage
    The TF:Source project was ripping assets without permissions outside of their original game and engine, causing a DMCA. Since Valve is usually ok with modding, and they also have occasionally given permission to use their ressources, you can't pin that one on them. More like people just started ripping stuff out with no care at all and are now acting like the victims.
    The Portal64 project did not get a DMCA as far as anything I've read about it so far goes, but it was the result of the (almost certain) trouble that would come with using Nintendo proprietary code without permission too (granted, getting permission from Nintendo is probably quite hard at this point).
    I'll agree that the current IP system, especially regarding old, unmaintained games and content, is troublesome. But as it is right now, I find it hard to infer "Valve will DMCA everything under the sun" from these cases.

    • That Nintendo code is over 25 years old.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        A computer program is considered a literary work, and a 27 year old literary work is still fairly new. It's not even one-third of the way through its nominal life.

    • Re:Not looking into details much (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @11:49PM (#64151907)

      I agree this is a very inflammatory headline. I don't think Valve is being unreasonable here.

      And it should be mentioned that while these games are old, they are certainly not unmaintained and still have an active player base.

      Portal: last update, January 5, 2024 (6 days ago)
      Team Fortress 2: last update, January 9, 2024 (2 days ago)

      That, and the fan-made Portal mod "Portal Revolution" was just released last week on Steam. It provides a new story and 40 puzzles built in the Source engine using Portal assets. It's awesome. Fan-made Valve addons are certainly alive and well, but don't just steal their assets and try to make a sequel, please...

  • libultra (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @09:21PM (#64151663) Homepage Journal

    I'm not fully clear on what "proprietary libraries" means here, but it seems likely that Portal 64 was developed using some variation of Nintendo's official development tools for N64
     
    Except for machine code demos, all commercial games and most hobby projects use Nintendo's libultra [n64brew.dev] as essentially an "operating system" jammed into a lib.

  • Valve refuses to support their existing Team Fortess 2 product in any meaningful way. Nobody would be trying to port the game to Source 2 if Valve would take care of their own product which stupidly still makes them money. Clueless fans keep buying keys for a game that has been taken over by catbots.

    Will Valve port TF2 to Source 2 like they did with Counter Strike and Defense of the Ancients 2? No!

  • Seriously... what has Valve even done lately besides suckle their 30% from the teat of Steam and other peoples' work? Okay, every few years they'll dump some innuendo into the rumor mill to tease us. But aside from that one VR tech demo with Alyx a few years back, it's been a whole lot nothing delivered. No Half Life 3, no Episode 3, no Portal 3, no Left for Dead 3, no Half Life / Portal crossover as teased in the games, no Gordon, no GLaDOS, no new franchsises, no... well... nothing... just the occasion

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