Honestly, a bit surprised by this. It wasn’t even on Steam. Hopefully switching to an open source SDK will get this back up.
“Hey, don’t use code for our dead game console we stopped manufacturing 22 years ago and don’t support anymore!”
Who gives a fuck, Nintendo?
Nintendo could benefit greatly by just allowing these kind of projects, but that would be out of character and we can’t be having that.
It’s a bit like if Metallica had just embraced Napster
It was Scorpions that went after Napster, no?
It was primarily Metallica.
Removed by mod
Lars Ultrash was the most publicly outspoken and often quoted in the Record Companies PR propaganda push for the DMCA and against Napster. He came off like a greedy bitch at the time, and created the perceptions of Metallica as a cash grab sell out band more than they already were being seen as by long time fans.
It wasn’t Nintendo, it was Valve taking preemptive action because of how Nintendo has acted in the past…
It’s unfortunate, but it’s pretty reasonable given how Nintendo is.
Wasn’t it taken down at Valve’s request, not Nintendo’s demand?
Yes, but mainly because Valve doesn’t want to deal with Nintendo’s lawyers since it used their libraries.
I really wish they would and set a precedent for Nintendo’s anti-consumer tactics.
Officially yes. We have no idea if Nintendo sent a private email saying “please figure this out before we do.”
It’s a shame, but their request doesn’t seem unreasonable. No one likes dealing with Nintendo’s lawyers. I hope switching SDKs works out!
Apparently even Valve’s lawyers don’t like dealing with Nintendo’s lawyers.
I mean… Tbf, they are kinda dicks, so yeah, I get it.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my interactions with my local (city) government, it’s that staff lawyers are lazy fucks who won’t lift a finger to do what’s clearly the right thing without somebody else that has power whipping them along.
It sucks but I also wouldn’t want to get involved with Nintendos lawyers so I can’t blame Steam.
I think people are missing the fact that most fanmade content that Valve has historically been ok with is all original material. Black Mesa, Portal Stories, and others all used the Valve IP but were all original content. This port actually uses Valve-created content so, regardless of Nintendo’s involvement (although it makes the demand for this action stronger), they legally have to enforce it or risk losing the legal protections for that property.
Nintendo just gave them a convenient way to stop it before they needed to do it anyways.
I don’t think thats how it works for copyright. You have to defend your trademarks to keep them but for copyright, you can decide who can use it rather arbitralily.
Especially allowing a release of an old game on platform you don’t support which would not really compete with you.
It’s not about whether it competes. It’s about whether a “reasonable person” could confuse it for being an authorized product of the IP owner. In this case, people could confuse it with both a licensed Nintendo product (since it runs on original hardware) and it could be confused with an official Valve release (since the content is an exact (as possible) recreation of the levels and assets from the original game.
So you are clearly talking about trademark. A game design can’t be trademarked. Only the name. Yes, if the name could be confused, that could be an issue. Maybe the cover art to some extent, if it is trademarked.
But if the game origin can be confused, so what? No law against that.
if nintendo has the potential to take legal action against valve for this I dont blame them for doing this. Nintendo has some fucking balls to the walls lawyers that will do anything to protect their IPs. Valve has every reason to be afraid of nintendo
I don’t think Nintendo would have a case against Valve, only against the developers of the demake. It looks more like Valve wants to maintain a good relationship with Nintendo, given Valve has ported Portal to the Switch and may intend to port more of their back catalog.
Some people are also saying valve gave the guy a friendly warning about using the Nintendo sdk rather than sending a cease and desist, and the reporting on it was misleading
A demake is a video game remake on an older platform, or one which converts the game to an older graphical or gameplay style.
They also likely have a touchy relationship right now considering the removal of dolphin.
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Stop with the fan projects already.
These companies don’t give a shit and will just squash any project that they can’t milk for funding.
Best case scenario you never release your work in fear of getting sued and nobody gets to play your game.
Make new projects inspired by these games and actually build your own fanbase instead of being at the behest of greedy corporations.
You know, you chose a bad post to get edgy.
Valve is actually one of the companies that treats fan projects very well, sometimes they’ll even let you sell your project on Steam (see Black Mesa remake).
Valve is actually one of the companies that treats fan projects very well
Well, not this fan project…
No, but one example does not define everything.
No, but one example does not define everything.
Before the announcement of Counter-Strike 2, a hobbyist team made a prototype of CSGO in Source 2. Then Valve made them stop. Same with TF:Source2 now.
Yes, but Valve didn’t block it based on their own IP. The focus really should be on the fact that Nintendo is so litigious. This was a fan project of a non-Nintendo IP. Their reputation is preceding them.
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.
Its actually pretty uncommon for Valve to DMCA Cease and Desist over mods… theres probably more at play here than just Valve are big meanie heads.
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.
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?
Dear fucking god yeah then Valve was definitely trying to save these idiots from themselves, thats nearly certain to get them fucked.
The actually law DEMANDS you defend your IP or you effectively lose it
Damn, remember when Sega lost the sonic IP to all the fan games?
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.
The actually law DEMANDS you defend your IP or you effectively lose it
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.
You know that’s not how lawyers view projects in development
You know that’s not his lawyers view projects in development
You know that Nintendo’s lawyers did not even raise a finger, right?
When did I say Nintendo
Guess you didn’t hear about TF2 in Source 2.
Sure did. It’s really not that hard to understand why Valve would not let someone remake a game that still hovers at around #50th place in Steam’s most played games globally…
Nah, he’s good
Valve is actually one of the companies that treats fan projects very well,
Except when they don’t feel like it. See “Team Fortress: Source 2”. https://www.shacknews.com/article/138260/team-fortress-source-2-cancelled-dmca
That’s a lot harder…
Not just to design and come up with, but to get people to even try it.
The smart move is to make something like this, release your own game, then release the fan project which brings visibility to your original game.
lol “the smart move is to make 2 games before you release one”
No shit
Any other nuggets of wisdom? “The even smarter move is to make 3 games before you release one”?
Any other nuggets of wisdom?
You should probably understand the first one before moving on
ate the onion
Not really, the onion is good satire while your comment is hot garbage that you pretend is satire because you realized how asinine your original comment was.
The smarter move would have been to release the onion comment first then release your original comment after you had some upvotes.
Much like satire, usernames seem to be a challenging thing for ya. It’s not my comment.
Sorry. Sometimes I do this thing where I treat people defending idiots like idiots themselves.
Nothing personal.
Totally. Not indicative of a total lack of both awareness and self awareness at all. I completely understand.
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Woosh
Along with that, contribute to Free Software games instead of working for free to improve commercial for-profit ones.
So because it depends on Nintendo libraries, valve wanted it taken down, but valve doesn’t represent nintendo and the project isn’t by them or on steam, so who’s actually at risk of being sued and why?
If Nintendo asked the developer to stop using Nintendo stuff I’d get it, but in that case it was never legal to begin with and the developer knew they had no license to use those libraries, so why all of a sudden does the developer not want to continue at the request of valve, are they an employee of valve or something? This is super weird, its not even a nintendo IP
Pure speculation:
Nitendo is one of the most notorious copyright litigators in the industry, it would not surprise me if they objected to the use of their libraries and pressured valve to exercise their ownership of the IP to shut it down
I know nothing about this, so honestly don’t listen to me. But Nitendo is a huge joykill so I’m happy just assuming it’s at least partly their fault
So because it depends on Nintendo libraries, valve wanted it taken down, but valve doesn’t represent nintendo and the project isn’t by them or on steam, so who’s actually at risk of being sued and why?
Valve is happy to allow fan creations when they are on Steam. Valve doesn’t want such things outside of Steam and used a sock puppet to save face.
Maybe if he gets permission from Nintendo he could keep going
How do grown ass adults look at this and think anything other than “damn, that’s pretty cool!”? Literally nobody and no company has any conceivable money to lose over this and couldn’t convince me otherwise. Law should have nothing to do with all this pussyfooting about legality.
Valve removed it because it used official N64 APIs that Nintendo holds as classified information. I think if it had totally been bottom-up crafted from scratch, it would have survived. But Valve does NOT wanna deal with a Nintendo lawyer.
Classified?
Classified?
APIs fall under fair use: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/how-the-supreme-court-saved-the-software-industry-from-api-copyrights/
Hi, Android dev here. This is a different issue albeit a tangential one. But ultimately it has no bearing on the matter.
The Oracle v Google case revolves around Google’s reimplementation of the Java APIs on the Android platform. This is key. Back when Android started, they used Apache Harmony to provide the Java API set on Android. Harmony was an open source implementation of the Java API set. Sun (the creator of Java) didn’t care, they held the copyright to the Java implementation, but made their money in different ways, so they let the Harmony project live.
Fast forward a decade. The Apache Harmony project is dead. Android is stuck at Java 6 level APIs because of it, Android devs are annoyed they can’t even get Java 8 features. And Oracle bought Sun, and is monetizing the shit out of Java. They started charging money for the official Java SDK. Google didn’t want to pay Oracle, so they started reimplementing the newer Java APIs into Android, to pick up where Harmony had left off. Oracle saw this, found some code in Google’s reimplementation that was similar to the official implementation from Oracle (which is out in the open in the openjdk project) and sued the shit out of them looking for the payday they didn’t get when Google refused to pay Oracle a license.
Ultimately, the SCOTUS ruling says that APIs themselves are not copyrightable (ie you can’t copyright the .toString() function name). But you can copyright the implementation of that function. Ultimately Oracle still won a bit, because they found something like 6 function reimplementations that Google could not successfully defend as clean room implementations.
Why this is irrelevant to the Portal64 issue, is because the dev is not using the open source reimplementation of the Nintendo APIs. He’s literally using the Nintendo owned implementation of the APIs. That’s why he says he needs to switch to open source libraries. Those open source libraries have the same functions within them, but the implementation of said functions aren’t the same as the Nintendo ones (or they are and Nintendo just hasn’t sued the project into oblivion yet, I have no idea about the details).
Why this is irrelevant to the Portal64 issue, is because the dev is not using the open source reimplementation of the Nintendo APIs. He’s literally using the Nintendo owned implementation of the APIs.
Then the people here using the term “API” should have rather used “libraries” or “frameworks” or whatever. I cannot look myself because the Github repo is private now.
Well, libraries are collections of APIs and sdks are usually collections of libraries. So they’re unfortunately kind of interchangeable when discussing them. But I agree with you the correct thing would be to say they’re using Nintendo’s proprietary libraries.
Well, libraries are collections of APIs and sdks are usually collections of libraries. So they’re unfortunately kind of interchangeable when discussing them.
An API is a specification of what functions are called and how they behave. See for example “Microsoft Windows provides the Win32 API” and “WINE provides the Win32 API on Linux” and also “Photoshop provides an API to write plugins” and “Affinity Photo provides the Photoshop API to support Photoshop plugins”.
When people, who don’t even know that finished the Portal64 ROM uses original Portal PC art assets copyrighted by Valve, try to lecture me about Valve acting as a henchman for Nintendo because of Nintendo APIs, I obviously dismiss them because they clearly have no clue about anything, even if by pure luck they may have a point regarding your definition of API use.
I like tech history. Loved your explanation about the Google vs Oracle legal battle.
Wait but why is Valve involved at all, then? Not like it’s their fault that some people they have nothing to do with are building a game based on those APIs, so shouldn’t Nintendo approach the developers of the port directly instead?
Valve holds the copyright to Portal, so Nintendo probably just “encouraged” them to pull some strings.
Nintendo probably just “encouraged” them to pull some strings.
Nintendo have their own litigation-happy lawyers. With the exception of the Portal Collection release for Switch, both companies have nothing to do with each other.
Nintendo sues everyone they encounter in the faintest context of their IP with the power of a thousand suns. See also, the failed launch if Dolphin on Steam. Valve is justifiably cautious here.
Valve is justifiably cautious here.
Valve doesn’t distribute the port.
Doesn’t matter
Doesn’t matter
If fact it does for the claim that Nintendo would sue Valve otherwise.
Right, but what the heck is up with Nintendo clinging into ancient obsolete stuff? They’re not stupid right?
Yes, Nintendo is stupid. They see capitalism as a zero-sum game, and so any time someone has or keeps their own money, that’s the same as Nintendo losing that money, so they do whatever they’re legally able to do to ruin people financially, going as far as taking 30% of your income for the rest of your life if you do wrong by them.
No but Nintendo is fiercely protective of all of its IP. We know there’s not really harm being done here but it is within their rights to block this and that is the road they always choose.
I may be overinterpreting this but it almooost seems, if you stretch it a bit, as if valve saved poor guys. Valve said stop, Nintendo’d say pay up.
Why do grown adults keep using IP copyrighted by big companies? Unofficial ports, unofficial remakes, unofficial sequels, etc. get taken down all the time and yet constantly the creators think “no, my project is special. It’ll be spared that fate” and almost every time they’re wrong.
A Portal-like game without using Portal assets and Valve had no leg to stand on…
A Portal-like game without using Portal assets and Valve had no leg to stand on…
This wasn’t taken down because it was based on Portal. It has nothing to do with Portal or Valve, really. It was taken down becuase it uses the official N64 SDK, which is still for some reason considered “confidential.” Valve said to take it down either under duress from Nintendo, or because Valve expected to be under duress from Nintendo and didn’t want to be. If it had used the libdragon API library instead of Nintendo’s official one, then this wouldn’t have happened and Nintendo would have been told to bite rocks.
You have no clue. It was Valve who issued the DMCA takedown. Yes, based on the wrong argument that APIs are copyrighted by Nintendo but Valve cannot take down random software. They are only involved because it uses Portal assets.
I think you need to read the comment you replied to again.
Here’s the bullet points:
Valve doesn’t want Nintendo getting involved
Valve think Nintendo will get involved because the project is using confidential Nintendo code
Valve think Nintendo may litigate (or are already) against them because Portal is Valve’s IP
Valve want it down so Nintendo can’t mistake it to be Valve’s responsibility and so Valve don’t get the blame
Valve is only involved because the game uses Valve’s assets. It’s not so hard to understand. Nintendo didn’t even issue the takedown. Valve did.
Neither I or the person you replied to have said Nintendo have issued this takedown. That is not what we said
Exactly. Valve did because the port uses Valve assets. That’s what I said.
It wasn’t a DMCA. They advised the dude to take it down due to Nintendo bring Nintendo.
This information is really easy to look up.
It wasn’t a DMCA. They advised the dude to take it down due to Nintendo bring Nintendo.
This information is really easy to look up.
People here are constantly claiming that Nintendo demanded from Valve to take action in order to not get sued. I suggest you complain to the paid authors of PC Gamer because they are the ones writing about Valve lawyers: “there’s at least a possibility Valve could end up sucked into a dispute over it. Even if it’s only tangential involvement, Valve’s lawyers may have just decided that it’s not worth the headache.”
It started out as a fun project by just a normal guy.
It is literally not possible to make a game like this any other way.
I would bet the concept goes underground and continues tho.
He uses Valve IP, therefore Valve was even the position to make any demands in the first place.
Valve cannot just go through the homebrew community and demand takedowns of random games. They could in this case solely because they own the assets. How is this so hard to understand that I have to repeat myself over and over again?
Do you think it’s hard to understand?
I don’t think you understand that it was started as a fun side project to see if he could actually do it. He wasn’t trying to make the next AAA game
Why would a grown ass adult put so much effort into an unlicensed dupilcation of copyrighted IP (Valve) and build it on top of a system from a company known for ridiculous enofrcement of IP that had a walled garden of access to their game system IP that is protected by the copyright cabal supported DMCA?
There’s more sides and nuance to all of this.
He could’ve made Portal in the style of a 90s console instead of directly declaring it N64 and only had to tend with permission for it as a mod from Valve’s sometimes permissive pov without crazy assed 'Tendo being involved.
Because that’s cool as fuck.
If he did it your way, that defeats the purpose of the constraints in the exercise.
It’s ‘cool as fuck’ right up until he gets personally sued out of existence by Nintendos balls crazy legal team.
The excercise maybe made sense 10 years ago, before we all became were aware of just how uninterested Nintendo gets over cool shit that used any of their licensed technology.
My bet is that Valve doesn’t like it when you reproduce their games using the same name, since both this and TF2 source 2 got hit, but we also got an original portal mod on steam last week, and Black Mesa is a monetized remake of HL1 that exists on steam.
Hell there are dozens of mods and expansions available directly on steam with their own store page instead of workshop.
If the name is the problem and Valve wants to be cool they could just say that.
Legal teams. Not there to be cool, there to shut things down. Chances are that team bypassed the folks that make the cool decisions. So there is a chance this could be changed when the right person catches wind.
This wouldn’t be the first time. I have dim memories of this sort of thing happening before. Just not quite sure on the details.
That’s not the only problem, I think. It’s not an adaptation of their work, it’s a “demake” which means it uses original source files or, at best, exact recreations of that work. The other projects people are comparing this to adapted Valve’s work to make something original. This isn’t original and uses the existing name. It would be very easy for Valve to make the claim that this product could be confused as an official Valve product even if most people who are interested would know the difference or be able to tell.
Black Mesa also had to change its name one time iirc. It was originally being developed as Black Mesa: Source, and Valve told them to drop the “Source” part.
Watching Black Mesa development was really neat, because it kept getting delayed, then they stopped updating fans while insisting it was still in development, and we’d all pretty much decided it was never getting finished.
Then it came finally came out and was so good Valve let them license and sell it.
Just read the article. It’s about Nintendo.
Valve has stated that they are okay with people making mods using their property, as long as they either openly state that they are not Valve, and do not use Valves IP in their names unless they ask for permission by Valve, which they will give in many cases. They are more strict when it comes to commercial games using their IP, of course. I think in the case of Portal 64 though, it definitely has to do with Nintendo’s ridiculously over the top protection of their copyrights.
Black Mesa was also limited by valve in some minor ways
I remember being at PAX East in 2019 before COVID, and they had a booth there. They had big box copies of Black Mesa which I thought was really cool, I wanted to buy one just to have on display. But they said valve actually said they weren’t allowed to sell them. It was only for a promotional purposes at the booth.
This blows. Lawyers ruin everything
Why not just call it something else? Valve doesn’t own the concept of portals. Swap out the models and textures and then accidentally release a separate conversation mod when the project is done.
It sounds from the article like the ultimate issue is use of Nintendo IP, not Valve’s.
Though I’ve never understood why Nintendo is so authoritarian about its IP.
Not just Nintendo, it’s a Japanese thing. (Not to suggest it’s unique to them, just look at Disney.)
Nintendo is scared shitless of getting their IP rights taken from them by allowing general usage. For instance, they absolutely hated that old thing where any old person would call any game console a Nintendo because if Nintendo became a generic word for console they’d lose protections for it.
The ridiculous thing is that if I recall correctly this game isn’t using Nintendo IP. It’s just trying to run on outdated Nintendo hardware. Come to think of it is Nintendo trying to copyright low poly art styles.
From what I read, the codebase is using Nintendo proprietary sdk libraries in its codebase. So that is technically Nintendo IP. The fix is to switch to open source implementations of those libraries. But the dev is hesitant to put in that work without Valve’s approval, because if he does that work Valve can still fuck him over for using their Portal IP, and an n64 game isn’t distributable on Steam, so there’s literally nothing in it for Valve to bless/support it. So he’s worried that all that effort would be for naught. And Nintendo already threatened Valve in the past when Dolphin was attempting to distribute on Steam, and Valve backed down. So the theory is that Valve doesn’t want to piss off the big N in any way legally.
Now, we can ask ourselves why almost 30 year old sdks are still valuable to Nintendo, but unfortunately copyright law being what it is, it’s technically illegal to do what the dev did. He should have seen this coming and used the open source libraries instead of the Nintendo proprietary ones. But I say this not knowing how good those open source libraries are, they could have problems, be incomplete, etc., or maybe not exist when he started the project. But either way a dev should have known using Nintendo IP in any form is fraught with peril.
While the ultimate issue is Nintendo’s IP, obviously you can’t remove Nintendo’s IP in this case since it’s for the N64, so the only other option is to remove valves. I understand why valve doesn’t want to implicitly endorse an N64 game with their IP by saying nothing, but if they remove valves IP then all that’s left is a generic N64 hobby project which Nintendo wouldn’t bother acknowledging.
Because that is all they got. Even if they make some profit on the sale of the hardware, it is peanuts compared to the game and tie-in sales. Losing control of even a single IP would be a serious hit to them.
It sounds from the article like the ultimate issue is use of Nintendo IP, not Valve’s.
But it wasn’t Nintendo of America who issued the takedown. It was Valve and they don’t represent Nintendo.
Swap out the models and textures and then accidentally release a separate conversation mod when the project is done.
And audio. The GLADOS monologues are in as well.
Valve has been quite supportive of fan projects like Black Mesa and Delta Particles and only demanding to remove Half-Life from the name to protect their trademark. But I guess they don’t want to risk involving Nintendo.
Dang anyone got a demo dl link before it was taken down?
Lmk if you find it. I bought an everdrive just to play it and now it’s gone ;-;
No surprise, but hopefully they can figure something out with Valve
It wasn’t even on Steam
That’s why it was taken down. Valve needs their cut.
Til valve gets a “cut” from free downloads
How the fuck is that what you got from my comment.
What would they be getting a cut of when its free, is what they’re saying.
And I’m saying the reason Valve took it down, was because it’s a free download not on their service. So Valve isn’t getting a cut.
