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.
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.
sanpo@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
vexikron@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Dear fucking god yeah then Valve was definitely trying to save these idiots from themselves, thats nearly certain to get them fucked.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
Why would Valve be sued by Nintendo, considering that they aren’t involved with that fan project at all?
GBU_28@lemm.ee 5 months ago
The actually law DEMANDS you defend your IP or you effectively lose it
yamanii@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Damn, remember when Sega lost the sonic IP to all the fan games?
woelkchen@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Portal64 builds the ROM locally. A legal copy of Portal for PC is required to extract and convert the assets. Websites distributing the finished ROM are liable for copyright violation against Valve but Valve isn’t liable for anything regarding that fan project by Nintendo.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 5 months ago
You know that’s not his lawyers view projects in production
woelkchen@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You know that Nintendo’s lawyers did not even raise a finger, right?
vexikron@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Yep.
After a tiny bit more research, it looks like for the Portal Demake, Valve did not even actually issue a Cease and Desist, they actually just heavily recommended the project be cancelled /out of fear of the devs being fucked by the far, far more absurdly litigious Nintendo/.
While I think Nintendo’s actually legal argument in that, which would basically be that a whole art style from the lower res and lower poly graphics constitutes essentially their brand … I think this is bullshit and legally dubious, but of course Nintendo has faaaar more money to throw at lawyers than some random indie dev, so theyd likely have their lives ruined one way of another.