Valve hasn’t tended to have a policy around its IP addresses as restrictive as Nintendo’s, but that seems to have changed, seeing as the company behind Steam recently canceled two fan-made projects with no ties to it: and port of Team Strength 2 based on source 2 aa demake From the first Portal for Nintendo 64.

Like him port of Team Strength 2 based on Source 2, such as demake of Portal for the Nintendo 64 were dropped by Valve referring to the American Digital Age Copyright Act, better known by its abbreviation in English: DMCA.

About the case Team Strength 2, you can read on GitHub that its assets “were ported to Source 2 without permission and Amper Software is redistributing them in game mode for Facepunch’s S@box. Facepunch has not licensed any Valve assets for S@box. “Unauthorized transfer and redistribution of Valve assets without license violates Valve’s intellectual property.”

Considering the case demake of Portal for the Nintendo 64 it was introduced by its creator and developer James Lambert It’s possible that Valve took the action more out of fear of Nintendo than to defend its intellectual property. This interpretation of the facts is plausible if we consider that Dolphin, a Game Cube and Wii emulator, did not last long on Steam due to this type of problem.

James Lambert explained that “because the project depends on Nintendo’s proprietary libraries, they asked me to remove it ( demake of Portal). I will let you know everything in advance so that you can decide to cancel your support before the next payment cycle” on Patreon, and that demake of Portal for the Nintendo 64 managed to garner some attention as it showed quite a bit of promise.

Although both projects were brought down in basically the same way, it cannot be denied that the consequences would have been very different. He port of Team Strength 2 could stand as an unauthorized competitor to Valve’s game, but demake of Portal for the Nintendo 64, it would hardly be much more than a tech demo that wouldn’t be marketed, so the company behind Steam wouldn’t suffer any harm.

On the other hand, it is possible that Valve has changed the direction of its policy of defending its intellectual properties to be more aggressive, more similar to those of Nintendo. These two requests that invoke the DMCA conflict with facts such as Team strength the original evolved into mode for earthquake and that projects of amateur origin such as Portal: Revolution and Black table They work on Steam without problems and with the approval of Valve itself.

Time will tell if Valve has changed its policy on defending its IP.