Valve squashes Team Fortress 2 and Portal fan projects after years of leniency

engadget.com:

Valve may have had a change of heart about fan-made tribute projects “borrowing” its intellectual property. GamesRadar+ reported on the Steam maker’s DMCA takedown notice sent to the creators of Team Fortress: Source 2, a passion project porting TF2 to the more modern Source 2 game engine. In addition, the Steam maker squashed a Portal demake for the Nintendo 64, hinting at a possible shift toward a more protective corporate strategy from the typically lenient Valve.

“The TF2 assets have been ported to Source 2 without permission and are being redistributed by Amper Software in a game mode for Facepunch’s S@box,” the legally stern DMCA notice to Amper reads. “Facepunch has not licensed any Valve assets for S@box. The unauthorized porting and redistributing of Valve’s assets without a license violates Valve’s IP.”

Amper unsurprisingly says that’s the end of the line for Team Fortress: Source 2, but the labor of love may have already been hanging on by a thread. The development team wrote on X (Twitter) that the project was already in trouble due to recent code changes to S&box (pronounced “sandbox”), the Source 2-based development framework on which the passion project was built.

Hello everyone. We have some unfortunate news to share with you.

Today, we received a DMCA takedown from Valve on all our public GitHub repositories and all its forks made by the community.https://t.co/BQvtPwjPtn

— Team Fortress: Source 2 (@TeamFortressS2) January 10, 2024

Team Fortress: Source 2’s developers said the takedown notice was the nail in the coffin for the already teetering project. “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),” Amper posted.

Although the takedown is indeed viable from a legal standpoint, it still sends a message to fans about a possible strategy shift at the Steam Deck maker. Valve has typically turned a blind eye to fan projects using its IP,