Team Fortress: Source 2 fan project gets a DMCA from Valve

The Team Fortress: Source 2 project is now officially dead in the water after getting hit with a DMCA from Valve, although the creators were already stopping development.

For a quick bit of context — Team Fortress: Source 2 was a complete remake being done in s&box, which is a game creation toolkit from Facepunch, it's supposed to be a next-generation Garry's Mod. While it may be based on Source 2, it's quite different, and naturally under a specific license for Facepunch to use. That doesn't mean anyone can just use Valve's game assets inside s&box.

You can see the DMCA on GitHub which notes:

The original copyrighted work is Valve's game Team Fortress ("TF2") https://store.steampowered.com/app/440/Team_Fortress_2/. 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. 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.

For some reason they kept calling it S@box, but it's s&box. Quite a few thought it might be someone pretending to be working for Valve to be malicious, like apparently has happened with the take-down of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game engine OpenXRay recently.

Speaking on X (formerly Twitter), the Team Fortress: Source 2 mentioned:

While we were discussing the project's future internally recently, we already came to the conclusion to stop the development of the project due to the current state of the code being unusable anymore with s&box's recent major engine changes, and that we overall moved on from it.

And in a follow-up, mentioning this is basically the final nail in the coffin. So regardless, they were stopping anyway and it would be broken.

This has caused quite the commotion on social media, with many (even a few bigger industry names I've seen), calling out Valve about taking it down forcefully in such a way. Many arguing this is "not the Valve of old", and that Valve are "going after modders" and plenty more. But, there's a difference between modding an existing game, and remaking them entirely in a different game engine. I've said this before when it comes to Nintendo, Rockstar and *insert big name*, if you use someone else's IP, they will eventually come knocking and take it down. And in this case, it was a remake of a game that is still online and still technically (debatable I know) supported and making Valve money.

Even Garry Newman of Facepunch has now commented on the situation to make it clear too:

I think while it's maybe out of character for Valve to take down fan projects like this, it's hardly surprising when you have their entire game uploaded. I somehow don't think the "old Valve" would have let anyone port Half-Life to another engine and host it all publicly either.

S&box doesn't have a license to use Valve's content, only the engine. It's not a mod, it's not gmod. We didn't want to commit a chunk of profit so early in development when we don't even know what the final product will look like.

Amper did a really great job porting and making this all work. Sadly it was going to all be broken next week with the Scene System update, so at least this saves them the job of updating to be compatible.

Additionally, Valve also asked the creator of a recent Portal Nintendo 64 port to take it down (not a DMCA), as it used proprietary Nintendo tech.