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.
Yes, but mainly because Valve doesn’t want to deal with Nintendo’s lawyers since it used their libraries.
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.
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.
