"Hey, don't use code for our dead game console we stopped manufacturing 22 years ago and don't support anymore!"
Who gives a fuck, Nintendo?
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Nintendo could benefit greatly by just allowing these kind of projects, but that would be out of character and we can't be having that.
It wasn't Nintendo, it was Valve taking preemptive action because of how Nintendo has acted in the past...
It's unfortunate, but it's pretty reasonable given how Nintendo is.
Wasn’t it taken down at Valve’s request, not Nintendo’s demand?
Yes, but mainly because Valve doesn't want to deal with Nintendo's lawyers since it used their libraries.
I really wish they would and set a precedent for Nintendo's anti-consumer tactics.
Officially yes. We have no idea if Nintendo sent a private email saying "please figure this out before we do."
It's a shame, but their request doesn't seem unreasonable. No one likes dealing with Nintendo's lawyers. I hope switching SDKs works out!
Apparently even Valve's lawyers don't like dealing with Nintendo's lawyers.
I mean... Tbf, they are kinda dicks, so yeah, I get it.
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It sucks but I also wouldn’t want to get involved with Nintendos lawyers so I can’t blame Steam.
I think people are missing the fact that most fanmade content that Valve has historically been ok with is all original material. Black Mesa, Portal Stories, and others all used the Valve IP but were all original content. This port actually uses Valve-created content so, regardless of Nintendo’s involvement (although it makes the demand for this action stronger), they legally have to enforce it or risk losing the legal protections for that property.
Nintendo just gave them a convenient way to stop it before they needed to do it anyways.
I don't think thats how it works for copyright. You have to defend your trademarks to keep them but for copyright, you can decide who can use it rather arbitralily.
Especially allowing a release of an old game on platform you don't support which would not really compete with you.
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if nintendo has the potential to take legal action against valve for this I dont blame them for doing this. Nintendo has some fucking balls to the walls lawyers that will do anything to protect their IPs. Valve has every reason to be afraid of nintendo
I don't think Nintendo would have a case against Valve, only against the developers of the demake. It looks more like Valve wants to maintain a good relationship with Nintendo, given Valve has ported Portal to the Switch and may intend to port more of their back catalog.
Some people are also saying valve gave the guy a friendly warning about using the Nintendo sdk rather than sending a cease and desist, and the reporting on it was misleading
They also likely have a touchy relationship right now considering the removal of dolphin.
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Stop with the fan projects already.
These companies don’t give a shit and will just squash any project that they can’t milk for funding.
Best case scenario you never release your work in fear of getting sued and nobody gets to play your game.
Make new projects inspired by these games and actually build your own fanbase instead of being at the behest of greedy corporations.
You know, you chose a bad post to get edgy.
Valve is actually one of the companies that treats fan projects very well, sometimes they'll even let you sell your project on Steam (see Black Mesa remake).
Valve is actually one of the companies that treats fan projects very well
Well, not this fan project…
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Yeah... what this likely means is one or both of two things, for this Portal Demake and the Source 2 TF2 thing mentioned by another below:
1: Valve is still quite protective of their IP and may be working on their own new releases of some kind in these IP franchises.
and/or
2: Valve is still quite protective of these IPs and may have identified something like serious misconduct regarding something about these particular projects, or the people working on them... or they just are not looking to be even good quality games, and Valve does not want their actual games to be associated with or confused with games they expect to be of low quality.
I realize option 2 there is a bitter pill for many to swallow, but we are talking about a gaming company that is fairly well known for taking actually good mod ideas and at least attempting to hire or in some capacity work with the devs to create what often turned out to be successful games.
They are notorious for high standards in their own IPs. You've got Black Mesa and I think theres one HL2 mod that focuses on you as Commander Shepard from Opposing Force that were both actually greenlit to be sold, for money, as games on Steam, as well as a large number of successful HL2 mods that were not cancelled and are distributed for free by Steam, including Entropy Zero 1/2 and MINERVA.
Its actually pretty uncommon for Valve to DMCA Cease and Desist over mods... theres probably more at play here than just Valve are big meanie heads.
It's explained in the article, actually. ;)
The project was using Nintendo proprietary libraries, and Valve's already shown on previous occasion that they don't really want to go to court with sue-happy Nintendo.
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The actually law DEMANDS you defend your IP or you effectively lose it
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That's a lot harder...
Not just to design and come up with, but to get people to even try it.
The smart move is to make something like this, release your own game, then release the fan project which brings visibility to your original game.
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How do grown ass adults look at this and think anything other than "damn, that's pretty cool!"? Literally nobody and no company has any conceivable money to lose over this and couldn't convince me otherwise. Law should have nothing to do with all this pussyfooting about legality.
Valve removed it because it used official N64 APIs that Nintendo holds as classified information. I think if it had totally been bottom-up crafted from scratch, it would have survived. But Valve does NOT wanna deal with a Nintendo lawyer.
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Why do grown adults keep using IP copyrighted by big companies? Unofficial ports, unofficial remakes, unofficial sequels, etc. get taken down all the time and yet constantly the creators think "no, my project is special. It'll be spared that fate" and almost every time they're wrong.
A Portal-like game without using Portal assets and Valve had no leg to stand on...
A Portal-like game without using Portal assets and Valve had no leg to stand on...
This wasn't taken down because it was based on Portal. It has nothing to do with Portal or Valve, really. It was taken down becuase it uses the official N64 SDK, which is still for some reason considered "confidential." Valve said to take it down either under duress from Nintendo, or because Valve expected to be under duress from Nintendo and didn't want to be. If it had used the libdragon API library instead of Nintendo's official one, then this wouldn't have happened and Nintendo would have been told to bite rocks.
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My bet is that Valve doesn't like it when you reproduce their games using the same name, since both this and TF2 source 2 got hit, but we also got an original portal mod on steam last week, and Black Mesa is a monetized remake of HL1 that exists on steam.
Hell there are dozens of mods and expansions available directly on steam with their own store page instead of workshop.
If the name is the problem and Valve wants to be cool they could just say that.
Legal teams. Not there to be cool, there to shut things down. Chances are that team bypassed the folks that make the cool decisions. So there is a chance this could be changed when the right person catches wind.
This wouldn't be the first time. I have dim memories of this sort of thing happening before. Just not quite sure on the details.
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Black Mesa also had to change its name one time iirc. It was originally being developed as Black Mesa: Source, and Valve told them to drop the "Source" part.
Watching Black Mesa development was really neat, because it kept getting delayed, then they stopped updating fans while insisting it was still in development, and we'd all pretty much decided it was never getting finished.
Then it came finally came out and was so good Valve let them license and sell it.
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Why not just call it something else? Valve doesn't own the concept of portals. Swap out the models and textures and then accidentally release a separate conversation mod when the project is done.
It sounds from the article like the ultimate issue is use of Nintendo IP, not Valve's.
Though I've never understood why Nintendo is so authoritarian about its IP.
Nintendo is scared shitless of getting their IP rights taken from them by allowing general usage. For instance, they absolutely hated that old thing where any old person would call any game console a Nintendo because if Nintendo became a generic word for console they'd lose protections for it.
Not just Nintendo, it's a Japanese thing. (Not to suggest it's unique to them, just look at Disney.)
The ridiculous thing is that if I recall correctly this game isn't using Nintendo IP. It's just trying to run on outdated Nintendo hardware. Come to think of it is Nintendo trying to copyright low poly art styles.
From what I read, the codebase is using Nintendo proprietary sdk libraries in its codebase. So that is technically Nintendo IP. The fix is to switch to open source implementations of those libraries. But the dev is hesitant to put in that work without Valve's approval, because if he does that work Valve can still fuck him over for using their Portal IP, and an n64 game isn't distributable on Steam, so there's literally nothing in it for Valve to bless/support it. So he's worried that all that effort would be for naught. And Nintendo already threatened Valve in the past when Dolphin was attempting to distribute on Steam, and Valve backed down. So the theory is that Valve doesn't want to piss off the big N in any way legally.
Now, we can ask ourselves why almost 30 year old sdks are still valuable to Nintendo, but unfortunately copyright law being what it is, it's technically illegal to do what the dev did. He should have seen this coming and used the open source libraries instead of the Nintendo proprietary ones. But I say this not knowing how good those open source libraries are, they could have problems, be incomplete, etc., or maybe not exist when he started the project. But either way a dev should have known using Nintendo IP in any form is fraught with peril.
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This blows. Lawyers ruin everything
Valve has been quite supportive of fan projects like Black Mesa and Delta Particles and only demanding to remove Half-Life from the name to protect their trademark. But I guess they don't want to risk involving Nintendo.
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