Valve, known for being open to fan creations, has surprisingly removed two popular community projects. The affected projects are Portal 64, a remake of the original Portal for the N64, and Team Fortress: Source 2, which aimed to create a new Team Fortress experience in the Source 2 engine.
On January 10th, the developers of both projects announced they had stopped development and the projects would no longer be available for download.
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
James Lambert, the developer behind Portal 64, released the first 13 test chambers as First Slice on December 29th. However, he removed the project on January 10th, following Valve’s request. Lambert shared on Patreon (via Time Extension) that Valve asked him to take down the project due to its use of Nintendo’s proprietary libraries.
On the same day, Amper Software, the team behind Team Fortress: Source 2, informed their followers that Valve had issued a DMCA takedown notice. The project, which had already been internally shelved by Amper Software, was removed from GitHub following Valve’s claim of IP infringement.
Valve’s DMCA notice stated that the team had ported Team Fortress 2 assets to Source 2 without permission, violating Valve’s intellectual property rights.
This action contrasts with Valve’s recent handling of Portal: Revolution, a Portal 2 mod that was released on Steam last week. Valve reviewed and approved this mod after a temporary delay.
Valve’s decision regarding Portal 64 is thought to be influenced by a desire to avoid conflicts with Nintendo, similar to the situation last year with the Dolphin emulator’s planned Steam release.
