After years of supporting mods and fan games, Valve takes action against Team Fortress and Portal fan projects

10.01.2024 - 22:21 / gamesradar.com / James Lambert

Valve has suddenly taken action against multiple fan games, stunning a fandom that had grown used to the company's freewheeling stance on unofficial community projects.

One of those projects was Team Fortress: Source 2, an effort to bring the beloved multiplayer game back to life in a more modern engine using the S&box project. The project had already run into development difficulties and had essentially been on hiatus since September 2023, but now Valve has issued a DMCA takedown against it, effectively serving as the "nail in the coffin" for the project, as the devs explain on Twitter.

"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 [sic]," Valve's DMCA notice says. "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."

The other project is Portal 64, a demake of the 2009 puzzle game that ports it to run on an actual N64. Developer James Lambert had been working on the project for years, but it gained substantial notoriety this past December with the release of First Slice, a playable demo featuring the first 13 test chambers.

It doesn't appear that Valve issued a formal DMCA against Portal 64, but the end result is the same. In a Patreon post (which was eventually made public on Twitter), Lambert said he had "been in communication with Valve about the future of the project. There is some news and it isn't good. Because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, they have asked me to take the project down."

I'm not fully clear on what "proprietary libraries" means here, but it seems likely that Portal 64 was developed using some variation of Nintendo's official development tools for N64, which were never officially released to the public. Open-source alternatives to those tools do exist, but might not have been in use here.

Valve has previously shown a great deal of caution when it comes to Nintendo dev secrets, preemptively removing the popular GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin from Steam for fear that it might include proprietary keys needed to authorize games to run. In both cases, it appears Nintendo did not take any direct action - it was just Valve acting on what it believed would be Nintendo's preference.

Given Valve's historic acceptance of fan games, the moves have been pretty shocking to the community. Major mods like Portal: Revolution have been given their own Steam pages, and the unofficial Half-Life remake Black Mesa is even a commercial product on that store front. Portal 64's relation to Nintendo and Team Fortress: Source 2's unusual distribution of Valve assets might