Link: https://nitter.net/TeamFortressS2/status/1745157814295617767
Valve is generally supportive of mods (hell, a Portal 2 mod was just released a few days ago) but it seems like recreating Team Fortress 2 was pushing it… Really sad, honestly. I really hope Valve would just strike a deal with these devs and make it official rather than throw away the insane amount of effort they put into re-building TF2.
Valve are well within their rights here. This isn’t new content or transformative. It’s literally trying to remake the same game using the same engine. These devs knew they were playing with fire. Never come between GabeN and his hats.
My thinking is that it was hot garbage that was trying to milk the TF2 name to grow their own fanbase. And valve didn’t want to be associated with that.
My guess is that Black Mesa looks great, had passionate people who were really communicating and engaging with Valve/community, didn’t infringe on the Half-Life trademark and it felt like a step forward, which is why it was allowed to continue AND even be brought to market.
They got a taste of their own medicine. They should have gotten rid of those low effort, asset swop games on the store then.
Makes me wonder where their line is between this and Black Mesa, though.
Black Mesa is a remake of a single player game that Valve wasn’t planning on remaking any time soon, more profitable to make it official and take a cut
TF2 actively still makes them sht tons of money, no profit in splitting the fan base
Imo, Trademark. Black Mesa is a concept from Half-Life, but “Black Mesa” to the best of my knowledge wasn’t a registered trademark. “Team Fortress/Team Fortress 2” are registered trademarks however, and that significantly changes the value and functionality of the specific terms.
That would only allow them the name, not the content. They always had to get Valve’s permission.
Yes, but it’s easier to give permission to use concepts that don’t infringe on trademark than it is to give permission on something that could be argued in court as muddying a trademark.
I know they require permission either way, but what permission they’re actually asking for changes based on what terminology they use
Well my point is that since the content is directly related, it actually doesn’t matter what they called it. It would’ve been exactly the same amount of infringement if they called it, “happy fun times at the science lab”.
The only differnce is it would’ve been less obvious to identify.
I get your point, my point is the infringement would be less egregious without trademark and thus easier for Valve to turn a blind eye to, or even potentially officially endorse via some potential deal à la Black Mesa.
But hey, I am fully willing to concede that I am just a layman with enormous distance from this topic and no specific expertise or insider knowledge, so the possibility of me being wrong is high
But we just got Portal Revolution some days ago, on steam.
I’d guess the fine line is “Valve intend to earn money from something official in the future”
We need to change IP and copyright law to add a “use it or lose it” clause for games that have been left to languish for eternity.
just result in companies releasing even shittier games just to protect their IPs.
Not eternity 95 years.
Unfortunately it’s not just well within their rights, it’s their legal obligation. The stupid situation that is America means that for them to be able to maintain their claim of ownership on the IP trademark, they have to both actively use the trademark and actively police unauthorized use of the trademark by others. If they don’t, they risk losing the right to claim the trademark, which wouldn’t just mean independents running servers for the game, but also would mean unscrupulous entities could produce and sell merchandise featuring the trademark en masse without having to seek permission from or pay any commissions to Valve.
It’s shitty, but it’s more shitty because of the stupid system we’ve built than because of any intentional malevolence on Valve’s part, imo.
Important caveat: I am not a legal professional and it is entirely possible my understanding of trademark law is flawed, but this is my earnest understanding of the situation.
DMCA has nothing to do with trademarks
Well then I got nothin’ 🤷♂️
No, it isn’t.
Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.
It is hardly incumbent on copyright owners, however, to challenge each and every actionable infringement. And there is nothing untoward about waiting to see whether an infringer’s exploitation undercuts the value of the copyrighted work, has no effect on the original work, or even complements it. Fan sites prompted by a book or film, for example, may benefit the copyright owner. See Wu, Tolerated Use, 31 Colum. J. L. & Arts 617, 619–620 (2008).
It being within their rights doesnt make it less shitty. Fuck IP
Portal 2 isn’t an ongoing live online multiplayer game with in game purchases.
The GitHub DMCA report linked in that post seems fake to me. It’s unprofessionally written and has many mistakes and inconsistencies across it.
if there’s one rule to modding valve games, it’s “don’t touch GabeN’s hat and skin sales”. TF2 despite being a real mess and valve’s server being practically unplayable, still brings in millions of dollars of gambling money, and now that CS2 keys are not tradable TF2 keys are in demand for laundering money. of course they are gonna take down a direct remake of their live service game minus all the bots and shitty cosmetics.
Not exactly. Plenty of CS mods give players knife skins and things while on the server for doing things in the server. They only work while in that server, but Valve doesn’t care. Releasing a product that could be mistaken for an official product is not smart though. They just released Counter Strike 2 (which was called CS Source 2 for a long time) so they have to defend their IP from confusion. This isnt likely about money because this wouldn’t hurt that in the slightest. Who had even heard of it before this post? It’s just something they have to do legally.
Seems like they were already planning on stopping the project anyways, Valve’s DMCA just happened to come while they were already deliberating on it:
While we were discussing the project’s future internally recently, we already came to the conclusion to stop the development of the project due to the current state of the code being unusable anymore with s&box’s recent major engine changes, and that we overall moved on from it.
Sadly, this means this DMCA takedown is the nail in the coffin. We cannot bring it back and we’ve hit Valve’s attention, it seems like they definitely don’t want us to use their IP (which is totally fair and legal from them).
Making a Portal mod is much different than possessing and using the original source code of a game. I don’t understand why they thought they could get away with such a high-profile title as TF.
I’d be more supportive of Valve if Team Fortress 2 wasn’t a dumpster fire to play in 2024. The game is infested with bots that make anything outside of independently moderated community servers unplayable.
Even Counter Strike 2 has dogshit anticheat despite the boasts that VAC Live was a solution that could surpass Vanguard, to the point where the only good competitive experience you can have is to play on FaceIt or ESEA servers with their own ring 0 anticheat solution.
If you can only have a good experience by installing malware, you don’t have a good experience.
I really should finish building that nvidia jetson based hardware anticheat that’d allow anyone to cheat even in vanguard protected games with perfect accuracy for just ~150$. Ring 0 anticheat’s only use is to spy on you and yet people will continue defending it until someone’s proven just how useless it is.
I don’t play Valorant, but I never heard my friend that does getting pissed at cheaters over there, compared to my friends that play CS2.
Can only speak for the higher ranks of both games but cs2 is currently unplayable above 25k elo since its almost guaranteed to have 1 out of 10 players cheating. While i only encounter a few cheaters each season in immortal in Valorant.
I mean TF 2 is 16 years old. They just don’t really support it anymore. I can’t comprehend how it’s still in or close to the top 10 steam games by player count when it’s been dead for years.
It got 14 new maps last year and hit a new concurrent player count record. It’s not even remotely dead.
Yeah dead as in doesn’t receive much love from Valve
Valve seems okay with TF2 mods on the older engine… See https://tf2classic.com/
I feel like the TF2Classic ran into dmca issues earlier in their dev cycle as well.
Edit: yes they did https://twitter.com/tf2classic/status/1436328611485818880
Is tf2classic any good? I loved tf2, but the bots just made it unplayable
it’s also important to consider that recreating an entire game like Tunnel Rush Team Fortress 2 would involve legal and intellectual property considerations.
I just wish Valve wasn’t pulling a Nintendo and not aiding the fans of a game they care about, instead of just sitting on it and claiming they are doing all they can for it.
How long has it been since we were promised a major update after Jungle Inferno? How long since Valve promised community fixes? How long since Valve delayed it with “we’re working hard on making it next update”? How long did Valve say they heard the community loud and clear about the bot crisis?
TF2 is my all time favorite game, but it’s no longer really playable in 2024. Casual servers are infested with bots, and there’s been no major changes to the game since 2017. I wish Valve cared about the game as much as the community still does dozens of years later.
Not all games need to be officially supported forever, tbh.
You can easily run your own server for it, so like UT99 or so, fans can form communities and play.
Basically, I’d rather them put effort into a Team Fortress 3, even though I know that’s of course utopian given we never got an HL3 either.
If they don’t want to support it that’s fine but they should stop releasing new micro transactions then
why do peopoe bot?
To get in-game drops as far as I know.
They most certainly made a decision based on priorities and TF2 wasn’t a big enough one for them to jump on. If there were enough users who would pay clamoring for it, they’d move.
Being a TF2 fan is fucking suffering…
being a valve fan is fucking suffering.
They used to make great games, but they have no need to anymore cause steam brings in $$$$Texas.
When does valve drop everything 3? There must be development for all the sequels working in the background, right?
no I don’t think so. they run steam instead.
It seems like it would have been a lot more friendly to have reached out personally first instead of via lawyers initially. Seems like these guys would have been receptive.
Maybe there’s some legal reason they couldn’t, but doesn’t seem like it to me.
how do you know they didnt
I guess I don’t. I would have assumed the team would have mentioned it. Especially if there was communication, but it moved forward to DMCA request anyway (i.e. there was a disagreement or something). But seems like the team would have responded pretty quickly.
But yeah, I don’t know for sure.
Still, it seems way more likely that Valve legal just went straight to DMCA.
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