this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Portal 64 dev says “don’t be mad at Valve” for the project’s shutdown (www.pcgamesn.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

TBH I see this more as Valve seeing that with a project this publicly known, if they don't defend their IP here they'll lose any future copyright claims and want to prevent it.

That would only apply to trademarks. Copyright has no requirement to sue to maintain the rights, but registered trademarks do.

I wonder if there was some sort of settlement between Valve and Nintendo, after Dolphin was removed from the Steam store, which requires them to support Nintendo. Even then, this is separate to the Steam store.

It does give them brownie points with Nintendo though, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yup your right, I was wrong. Valve keeps the copyright regardless.

Dolphin situation was different though. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/07/20/what-happened-to-dolphin-on-steam/

Valve only ever insisted that Nintendo had to give Dolphin permission to distribute since Valve was afraid of a potential DMCA coming from Nintendo if Nintendo thought that the encryption keys were IP illegally being redistributed. Since Nintendo says emulators are illegal everywhere but a courtroom, Dolphin team knew that they'd never get an ok. Valve probably knew that but didn't care enough to help fight that legal battle.

I'm not sure Valve cares about brownie points with Nintendo. The Steam Deck is a direct competitor against the Switch, Valve has done nothing to curtail the use of Switch emulators on Deck, and the work Valve has been doing makes using a switch emulator a better experience.

This whole thing only makes sense if Valve wanted to protect their IP. Involving Nintendo really does sound like blame shifting without having to actually go to court