Honestly, a bit surprised by this. It wasn’t even on Steam. Hopefully switching to an open source SDK will get this back up.
“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?
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’s a bit like if Metallica had just embraced Napster
It was Scorpions that went after Napster, no?
It was primarily Metallica.
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 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.
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.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my interactions with my local (city) government, it’s that staff lawyers are lazy fucks who won’t lift a finger to do what’s clearly the right thing without somebody else that has power whipping them along.
It sucks but I also wouldn’t want to get involved with Nintendos lawyers so I can’t blame Steam.
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…
No, but one example does not define everything.
No, but one example does not define everything.
Before the announcement of Counter-Strike 2, a hobbyist team made a prototype of CSGO in Source 2. Then Valve made them stop. Same with TF:Source2 now.
Yes, but Valve didn’t block it based on their own IP. The focus really should be on the fact that Nintendo is so litigious. This was a fan project of a non-Nintendo IP. Their reputation is preceding them.
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.
The actually law DEMANDS you defend your IP or you effectively lose it
Guess you didn’t hear about TF2 in Source 2.
Sure did. It’s really not that hard to understand why Valve would not let someone remake a game that still hovers at around #50th place in Steam’s most played games globally…
Nah, he’s good
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.
lol “the smart move is to make 2 games before you release one”
No shit
Any other nuggets of wisdom? “The even smarter move is to make 3 games before you release one”?
Any other nuggets of wisdom?
You should probably understand the first one before moving on
ate the onion
Not really, the onion is good satire while your comment is hot garbage that you pretend is satire because you realized how asinine your original comment was.
The smarter move would have been to release the onion comment first then release your original comment after you had some upvotes.
deleted by creator
Much like satire, usernames seem to be a challenging thing for ya. It’s not my comment.
Sorry. Sometimes I do this thing where I treat people defending idiots like idiots themselves.
Nothing personal.
Totally. Not indicative of a total lack of both awareness and self awareness at all. I completely understand.
Woosh
Along with that, contribute to Free Software games instead of working for free to improve commercial for-profit ones.
This blows. Lawyers ruin everything
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.
Classified?
Right, but what the heck is up with Nintendo clinging into ancient obsolete stuff? They’re not stupid right?
Yes, Nintendo is stupid. They see capitalism as a zero-sum game, and so any time someone has or keeps their own money, that’s the same as Nintendo losing that money, so they do whatever they’re legally able to do to ruin people financially, going as far as taking 30% of your income for the rest of your life if you do wrong by them.
No but Nintendo is fiercely protective of all of its IP. We know there’s not really harm being done here but it is within their rights to block this and that is the road they always choose.
Wait but why is Valve involved at all, then? Not like it’s their fault that some people they have nothing to do with are building a game based on those APIs, so shouldn’t Nintendo approach the developers of the port directly instead?
Nintendo sues everyone they encounter in the faintest context of their IP with the power of a thousand suns. See also, the failed launch if Dolphin on Steam. Valve is justifiably cautious here.
Valve holds the copyright to Portal, so Nintendo probably just “encouraged” them to pull some strings.
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.
You have no clue. It was Valve who issued the DMCA takedown. Yes, based on the wrong argument that APIs are copyrighted by Nintendo but Valve cannot take down random software. They are only involved because it uses Portal assets.
I think you need to read the comment you replied to again.
Here’s the bullet points:
Valve doesn’t want Nintendo getting involved
Valve think Nintendo will get involved because the project is using confidential Nintendo code
Valve think Nintendo may litigate (or are already) against them because Portal is Valve’s IP
Valve want it down so Nintendo can’t mistake it to be Valve’s responsibility and so Valve don’t get the blame
Valve is only involved because the game uses Valve’s assets. It’s not so hard to understand. Nintendo didn’t even issue the takedown. Valve did.
Neither I or the person you replied to have said Nintendo have issued this takedown. That is not what we said
So because it depends on Nintendo libraries, valve wanted it taken down, but valve doesn’t represent nintendo and the project isn’t by them or on steam, so who’s actually at risk of being sued and why?
If Nintendo asked the developer to stop using Nintendo stuff I’d get it, but in that case it was never legal to begin with and the developer knew they had no license to use those libraries, so why all of a sudden does the developer not want to continue at the request of valve, are they an employee of valve or something? This is super weird, its not even a nintendo IP
Pure speculation:
Nitendo is one of the most notorious copyright litigators in the industry, it would not surprise me if they objected to the use of their libraries and pressured valve to exercise their ownership of the IP to shut it down
I know nothing about this, so honestly don’t listen to me. But Nitendo is a huge joykill so I’m happy just assuming it’s at least partly their fault
Maybe if he gets permission from Nintendo he could keep going
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
A demake is a video game remake on an older platform, or one which converts the game to an older graphical or gameplay style.
They also likely have a touchy relationship right now considering the removal of dolphin.
No surprise, but hopefully they can figure something out with Valve
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.
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.
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.
It’s not about whether it competes. It’s about whether a “reasonable person” could confuse it for being an authorized product of the IP owner. In this case, people could confuse it with both a licensed Nintendo product (since it runs on original hardware) and it could be confused with an official Valve release (since the content is an exact (as possible) recreation of the levels and assets from the original game.
So you are clearly talking about trademark. A game design can’t be trademarked. Only the name. Yes, if the name could be confused, that could be an issue. Maybe the cover art to some extent, if it is trademarked.
But if the game origin can be confused, so what? No law against that.
