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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?"
Only a corporate officer that is fully enslaved by the lawyers of that corpo will not see how it's good business when humans engage with your product. When gamers play and interact with your code. It's pure folly to cite some trade war or corporate war with another corpo. No dude. Share with also other devs. Be a fucking human. You are not a corpo slave droid. I am so glad that valve is not publicly traded. Holy shit it must take a lot to be the leading company in this market and not bend to capitalist pressures
I miss The Specialists and Vampire Slayer mods so so much...
Science and industry.
There are some discords where people play HL1 mods once a week.
Specialists mentioned
Natural Selection was a quality one.
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.
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.
Im honestly a really big fan of copyleft. I think that it seems more "fair" in a system that requires sacrifice to make progress.
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)
Isn't this how they all are? L4d and l4d2 are the same unless you're hosting a server with .smx plugins.
Sort of, but those let you use the pre-existing codebase for each game as is. This lets you play with the inner workings. You could do something drastic like implant rollback netcode, add new classes, wild shit.
Gotcha
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.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, or what enshittification is, but how is the steam marketplace an example of it?
What a boss move by Valve
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
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!
Sup, fellow old person. I had a Voodoo 2 with 12MB of VRAM on my 200MHz Packard Bell.
Source mod tools not to be confused with Sourcemod tools.
You're a good doctor!