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

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.