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Valve has made an emasculatingly large amount of money this way. Following in the footsteps of Id Software, Valve has been very open with their development tools. I don't know about the very earliest copies but the ZOMG GOTY edition of the original Half Life included its SDK on the disc. Counter Strike and Team Fortress started out as mods that Valve just...hired.
Releasing the tools to their customer base and then hiring the cream that rises to the top is a strategy I struggle to get mad at.
Thinking back, HL had a ridiculous quantity of high quality mods and TCs back in the day. Hell, Valve have even allowed HL to be remade and sold on steam.
"We'd prefer you didn't use the word "Source" in the game title. You wanna sell Black Mesa on Steam?"
it only took 18 years and also several years of radio silence after some mod authors asked them to clarify the legality of their work
You're a good doctor!
Wow, this is an awesome move! We are honestly so lucky that Valve hasn't enshittified like so many other gaming companies out there.
I would say the marketplace is a form of enshittification. They're not burrowing headfirst into the shit like some platforms, but it's an inevitable trend regardless.
Plus who knows what happens when gabe isn't around any more. Best case scenario is he leaves the company to the workers as a co-op and then it has a chance to be a lasting legacy, but maybe it goes to someone who puts it up to be publicly traded and that's game over.
That's because Valve isn't owned by investors
Exactly.
A few takeaways from the move:
Ugh, greedy Valve making you spend $0 to buy the base game
[Edit] ok I read the article after making that joke and I see that it applies to several other valve games, not all of which are free to play
Lol. It's so greedy of them!
Jokes aside. It's an interesting distinction to make. Even though the source code is freely available, it doesn't mean developers have free reign to do anything they want like they could with open source software. Apart from special circumstances, everything made with the source code will still be mods.
It does harken back to the original HL mod scene though - some high quality stuff came out of that (and valve picked up the Devs too)
You can't do whatever you want with open source either. One big stipulation of copyleft licenses is the share-alike clause, which means you can't make modifications and then decide your program is now closed-source, so it protects the code from being enclosed again.
I mean yes you can make whatever modifications you want, generally, but it's not totally unrestricted.
Yeah, as a resident Valve hater I agree it’s a weird thing to get angry over.
If there was anything to get angry over is that I bought this game in a box (stand alone because I was too broke for Orange Box!) with an understanding that it’s an online multiplayer shooter. Meaning, there are servers you join manually from a list, shoot at other guys for a bit and return to that server or not based on how good time it was. This functionality has been ripped out of the game and replaced with some weird algorithm. Before that Valve broke their own design promises of clear silhouettes which made the game less accessible. The game has been dead, riddled with bots farming in-game items that can be traded for real money that Valve added to the game because they could. If it was any other game I wouldn’t care but TF2 started out as an amazing game that was mangled beyond recognition by Valve greed.
They should have released TF2 source code this way 10 years ago. They’re probably doing this now because income from TF2 related items on Marketplace is laughably small compared to their other titles.
This functionality has been ripped out of the game
Nope, see the server browser ingame
The game has been dead, riddled with bots
Not anymore!
The server list is still there fwiw. But yeah the matchmaking update was awful.
Aside from TF Classic and Pre Fortress, Pass Time 4v4 community is also planning for a mod release.
Goddamn, I miss those days! Got a real graphics card for TF2 (edit: I meant TF Classic) so I could see through water. Rocket jumping and cluster bombs, ahhhh. There was a mod with a grappling hook that was amazing.
3dfx cards were cheating! I can't see through water with my 1998 Packard Bell!
What's the point in switching to TFC anyway when QWTF was still quite alive and well with tons of mods(particularly on mplayer)!
MPlayer. Your gaming cred checks out. How are your knees doing these days?
Sup, fellow old person. I had a Voodoo 2 with 12MB of VRAM on my 200MHz Packard Bell.