Valve Issues DMCA Takedown Notices To Team Fortress 2 And Portal Fan Projects

Does Gaben know about this?

Valve has recently taken a more protective stance on its intellectual property by issuing DMCA takedown notices to Team Fortress 2 and Portal fan-made tribute projects. The projects are Team Fortress: Source 2 — which aimed to port Team Fortress 2 to the modern Source 2 game engine, and Portal 64 — an in-development playable port of Portal to the Nintendo 64. And this is surprising because Valve is typically lenient when it comes to fan projects. 

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

In the case of Team Fortress: Source 2, the takedown notice stated that the TF2 assets were ported to Source 2 without permission and redistributed in a game mode for Facepunch's S&box — violating Valve's IP. The developers, Amper Software, mentioned that the project was already facing difficulties due to recent code changes to S&box. Now, the project will officially end for good following the developers acknowledging Valve's decision.

Portal 64, an open source N64 demake of Portal was also taken down by Valve.

This is unheard of coming from the company known for helping people with their IPs pic.twitter.com/BrQOIR5sCU

— Joey (@JoeyCheerio) January 10, 2024

Portal 64 also faced a similar fate with its developer stating that Valve requested the takedown due to the project's dependence on Nintendo's proprietary libraries.