Amper Software, the team behind Team Fortress: Source 2, and James Lambert, the dev working on Portal 64, have stated that they’re ending development of their fan projects following cease and desist demands from Valve.
Team Fortress: Source 2 was a fan project aiming to port Valve’s 2007 multiplayer shooter, Team Fortress 2, over to the newer Source 2 engine. While the team had paused development in September, they were hoping to resume at some point, but the DMCA has made that pause permanent.
Meanwhile, Portal 64 is a project intended to demake 2007’s Portal to run on the Nintendo 64 hardware. Just a few days ago, the developer was celebrating the release of the game’s “First Slice,” which demonstrated the game’s progress.
The Team Fortress: Source 2 takedown seems rather understandable since Valve still supports Team Fortress 2 and may one day want to port it or create a sequel themselves. The DMCA posted on the public GitHub page cites that their reasons are due to Valve’s own assets being used in a project, though that hasn’t stopped some other fan games based on their properties from being published and even sold on Steam.
Meanwhile, James Lambert says that Valve has stated that they’ve requested Portal 64 to be taken down because “the project depends on Nintendo’s proprietary libraries.”
This is somewhat surprising since Valve has long supported fan endeavors based on their games, going as far as allowing them to be sold as retail products on Steam. Either this demonstrates a shift in the company’s policy toward such projects, or they actually have reasonable concerns toward these particular projects. Either way, it’s not a great look directly after their announced shift on their storefront policies in regards to AI.
