A Source 2 remake of Team Fortress 2 has been killed by Valve via a DMCA takedown. Created by fans, the Team Fortress 2 remake aimed to be a complete revival of the iconic FPS game.
Originally released in 2007, Team Fortress 2 heavily influenced the future of first-person shooters. For example, Blizzard’s free-to-play FPS Overwatch 2 is heavily inspired by the gameplay loop of TF2.
TF: Source 2 aimed to bring the entire Team Fortress 2 experience to Valve’s underused engine. Previously, the game engine was used to create the amazing virtual reality game Half-Life: Alyx.
Unfortunately, the team behind the video game remake revealed that Valve has DMCA’d the public GitHub repositories the team used to create the title. Following the DMCA takedown, the team made the decision to cease development of the Team Fortress 2 remake.
“[The] DMCA takedown is the nail in the coffin,” the developers announced. “We can not bring it back and we’ve hit Valve’s attention. It seems like they definitely don’t want us to use their IP (which is totally fair and legal for them).”
Valve has been rather relaxed on the use of its IP in the past. Famously, the Half-Life 1 Remake Black Mesa started as a fan mod before being given the greenlight by Valve to be sold on the Steam storefront. Nowadays, the game is treated with just as much love from fans as the original.
However, with Team Fortress 2 still being an actively played game on Steam, including an active marketplace for digital cosmetics, Valve seemingly isn’t okay with another team creating an alternative. In the future, when TF2 is properly dead, maybe a fan revival could take place.
TF2 isn’t the only fan project Valve has shut down. At the same time, the studio shut down a Nintendo 64 port of Portal, a project that excited many fans. Why this project has been taken down is unknown.
At the time of writing, Team Fortress 2 is more popular than it has been in a long while, following a recent update to the game. Unfortunately, there’s no plans by Valve to update the game to Source 2.