2024 had quite the start for people who worked on projects with Valve’s game engine.
Valve is a game developer and a publisher, known for their warm welcomes to the people who create new games using their engine. The most well-known examples of these are obviously games like Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2. While these mods are under Valve’s roof, some of the other mods that improve or test the creator’s patience can cause harm to Valve.
Rightfully so, Valve has struck two DMCA strikes on two in-progress mods, one being an ambitious project to port Portal to Nintendo 64, and the other one being a Source 2 port of the classic class-based shooter Team Fortress 2. Again, their generosity in allowing modders or creators to use their popular game engine, Source, is widely known, but seeing these two projects being shut down made people question whether Valve is becoming the pseudo-Nintendo.
Although everyone is right to think that, there are obvious reasons behind the game giant’s actions in this matter. Port of Portal on Nintendo 64 has to do with Nintendo themselves, as they do not allow custom content or even games being used in any other non-Nintendo product. At some point, the people who worked on the Nintendo emulators tried to bring the emulator to Steam, and Valve had to deny its allowance to not get a strike by Nintendo.
The second project, the Source 2 port of Team Fortress 2, sounds a bit stranger as there is no reason for Valve to shut down a project based on their own IPs. The reason behind the DMCA comes from the fact that the project was being worked on S&box Engine, a commissioned Source 2 port for a sandbox game, which was fully paid for by a third party. Since this version of the engine was not distributed for any other reasons, Valve had to make a strike to shut it down.
While the whole shutting-down community projects deal was going on, Team Fortress 2 players were not able to reach their items, meaning that they had to play with stock loadouts. It was the case for the past few days but seems like servers are now back online. This won’t stop players from complaining about bots though.
