Team Fortress: Source 2 and Portal 64 Fan Projects Shut Down by Valve Takedowns | Hacker News Reader

Team Fortress: Source 2 and Portal 64 Fan Projects Shut Down by Valve Takedowns

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56 pointsmikhael19 comments

Man, this is disappointing. It's particularly surprising that Valve has sent a DMCA here, given their history of pretty much all their popular games originating from the modding community or prior art and the history of fan projects like Black Mesa getting somewhat favourable coverage in the Steam store.

I wonder if they took issue with s&box coming from Facepunch, which might be something that is eventually profited from, thereby a TF2 remake in s&box could drive sales for s&box.

As someone who has attempted to license a paid Half-Life 2 mod, there's a pre and post-"Hunt Down The Freeman" era. From my understanding working with other licensees, it was so bad that they no longer want anyone working with their IP.

Valve doesn't work with the mod community anymore; they've pivoted hard into only working with UGC creators, which they do not consider the same.

Free mods can continue to exist, but it has to be within their walled garden, and done in ways that they approve of, and they offer no support or guidance. Even for licensees who have blessed support, they no longer have a dedicated Source Engine contact and haven't for years, or even over a decade(?).

Anything that is non-Source is a non-starter.

Most professionals have moved on to working with other IP or developing their own. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone does anything with Valve's stuff anymore, or they're too unfamiliar with working with Valve that they don't understand that their era of absorbing mods and turning them into full-fledged in-house IP is over and they don't treat fans the same way they did in the early aughts. The staff has changed dramatically and Newell himself appears less engaged in the company all together.

Seemingly, you can't get anything done at Valve, or working with them now. There are isolated teams there that work on hardware or existing legacy IP that generates cash flow from UGC work, but that's all Valve does now.

Appreciate the insight, very disappointing! Sadly, TF2 is in a practically unmaintained and unplayable state right now and it's a game that is still beloved by its fans all these years later. Any efforts to inject life back into the fanbase seem to be met with indifference from Valve at best and outright callous opposition at worst.

TF2 receives regular patches, fixing bugs. The sniper bot problem badly needs a proper fix.

I consider the lack of effective anticheat as essentially making the game unplayable/abandoned, regardless of whether or not they fix minor bugs or localization issues.

TF2 is my favorite game, and basically the only game I play. While playing on Valve servers can be troublesome in off hours, its usually bot free when playing during peak times. Also there are tons of community servers that are completely bot free all the time, so while valve may have mostly abandoned the game it is completely playable.

I don't have any insider insights on Team Fortress 2 in particular, just licensee or Valve Business Development topics.

The current public consensus on that subject though is that there are people at Valve that like Team Fortress 2 and work on it, but it doesn't win them any brownie points during things like peer review for bonus purposes like the clout you'd get for working on the Dota 2 or CS2 teams.

On the other hand when I clicked the Tweet linked in the article (https://twitter.com/TeamFortressS2/status/174515781256337864...) I thought I was looking at an official TF2 account for a while. So I'm not surprised that they are at least upset with some trademark issues.

Submission title is incorrect as regards Portal 64. Per the article:

> Portal 64, meanwhile is being shuttered due to the project "depending on Nintendo's proprietary libraries," according to an update on the project's Patreon. Like Team Fortress, Portal 64 sought to revive Valve's 2007 classic, but on Nintendo 64 hardware. Its developer celebrated the release of its "First Slice" demonstrating its progress on January 5.

That's disappointing given the effort to even generate the ROM directly from the pak file of the original game to avoid asset related issues. I'd have thought the N64 had a non-Nintendo SDK by now.

That's a serious dick move from whoever was responsible, Portal 64 was one of the most impressive things I've seen recently.

I don't get why Valve told the Portal 64 dev to take down the project because it depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries.

Especially since he wasn't distributing the libraries along with the game's source code.

Maybe they thought it would be a legal liability to have their IP associated with something infringing?

But then again it's almost 30 year old hardware, come on.

Pretty interesting that this is where Valve choose to flex their legal muscles. Here's some stats [0] from a UK Gambling Commission study from 6 years ago and I can't imagine they've gotten substantially better since then:

- 45%[!] of 11-16 year-olds were aware of "skin betting" [using virtual game items with direct monetary value as tokens on gambling websites]

- 11% of 11-16 year-olds had placed bets using in-game items

- [...]around 370,000 11-16 year-olds spent their own money on gambling in the past week, in England, Scotland and Wales.

Valve did send some C&Ds after the whole ProSyndicate, JoshOG non-disclosed gambling website controversy, then just... let it fester and continue. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Valve have made billions of dollars from indirectly helping very sketchy companies turn children into problem gamblers with no worries of KYC.

Glad to see that paying expensive lawyers to draft C&Ds to shut down impressive fan projects like these are what they choose to channel those ill-gotten funds in to. I hope the people working there are proud of the what they've done, particularly to children and young adults' minds.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42311533

Not surprised. Valve has really squandered a bunch of projects. Can't help but blame those in charge.

Valve, can you please let them at least make it please

Valve needs to enforce their IP to have it hold up in court if a more blatant and malicious project than TFS2 shows up. They can't selectively enforce IP, I think?

That's true of trademarks, but DMCA takedowns aren't that.

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