[HN Gopher] Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
___________________________________________________________________
Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
Author : davikr
Score : 635 points
Date : 2025-02-18 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jsheard wrote:
| This is good for modding but don't be misled, this is the
| TF2-specific code which sits on top of the still-closed-source
| Source engine. For example you couldn't port TF2 to a new
| platform with this, at least not without reimplementing Source or
| wrangling it into working with one of the leaked Source codebases
| and dealing with the legal fallout of that.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed. It is
| not an exciting engine to work with in any way. There are at
| least 3 major open source alternatives today, way more powerful
| and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot, Wicked). Only people that
| have been involved with Source in the past decades would enjoy
| working with it.
|
| The community around the engine is vibrant and well-versed in
| the caveats of the Source workflow. With a GPL release, just
| like Carmack did with id tech, the amount of creative projects
| from indies would sky rocket. No longer bound by obscure deals.
| SXX wrote:
| I pretty sure you'll soon get reply about how making it open
| source will increase cheating. So for those people it's
| important to know that Source engine source code was leaked
| many many times and anyone who will spend 5 minutes will find
| sources.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The guy is saying Godot is comparable to a game engine with
| hundreds of millions of dollars of product development. I
| wouldn't be worrying about what other people might say.
| Me000 wrote:
| It almost worked on me.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Indeed it's possible for Godot and Source to be good game
| engines and also not at all substitutes for each other.
|
| The kind of discourse that litigates why that fact is
| true doesn't serve curiosity or add knowledge.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Considering that Source is ancient and likely hasn't
| gotten an update from at least 2013 for TF2, the bar is
| low for how complete an engine needs to be for level
| comparisons.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Are you considering Source 2 in this assertion? That
| piece of software has received quite significant
| development effort.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| I'm not. Source 2 is very modern even by caveman gamer
| standards.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| I'm not really disagreeing with your point but I think in
| general Valve has kept their games that share an engine
| on the same trunk, so TF2 should be on a pretty recent
| version of source. The update accompanying this release
| includes the bicubic lightmap and radial fog
| implementations from the HL2: 20th Anniversary update.
|
| For Source 2 it ends up being a constant source of leaks
| where strings for engine features of in-development games
| get shipped out in Dota 2 and CS2 updates. We learned
| tons of stuff about Deadlock that way.
|
| https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238643
| SXX wrote:
| For anyone not looking for super realistic 3D and primary
| targeting PC audience Godot is enough to make good game.
| Majority of game devs do not build AAA titles with
| $10,000,000+ budget. A lot of players play mostly indie
| games.
|
| FFS some of the best indie games out there made was made
| on RPG Maker and let's say it's far less advance than
| Godot. After all games are all about enjoyable core loop
| and player expirience. And no game engine magically give
| you any of it.
|
| Company I co-founded released 2 games on PC and about to
| release 3rd one on PC and all the consoles. One of them
| was made with Godot, two with Unity. The only reason we
| had to switch to Unity are consoles. And the reason why
| Godot cant efficiently complete on consoles is the fact
| that platforms are backward and proprietary.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| And you're equating money spent on development with
| quality, performance, features, and compatibility. Please
| _do_ tell me about how Source even remotely compares to
| Unity or Unreal?
|
| Do you see Source being used in virtual soundstages? No.
| Does Source support Metal or Vulkan? No.
|
| Does it have anything approaching the 3D or 2D or
| rendering style capabilities of any modern engine? No.
|
| Is Source going to be remotely relevant for metaverse
| stuff? No.
|
| All the money in the world won't change the fact that
| Source is an outdated pile of garbage.
|
| Respawn uses it to this day for Apex, and it's horrific.
| Its graphics quality is atrocious especially for the
| demands it places on hardware. It has the worst latency
| of any similar multiplayer game (some events can take
| _half a second_ to make it from a player 's action to
| another player's system!) It lacks modern features that
| have been in other games for many years, like variable
| event rates (some games, for example, will use much
| higher event update rates for stuff happening within the
| player's field of view.)
|
| Its game engine has so many bugs around inputs, movement,
| and collisions that high level play revolves around
| abusing all of them for competitive advantage in what is
| lauded as "movement", and because Respawn never treated
| these issues as exploits, they got painted into a corner
| where they can't ever switch to a modern game engine
| because trying to get the quirks of movement behavior
| would be impossible.
|
| The game's input processing _is done in relation to
| framerate_ , for fucks sakes....so input processing
| behavior _changes depending on framerate._
|
| The security and anti-cheat in the game is so hamstrung
| by Source that multiple world tournaments have been
| hacked live and ultimately had to be done in secret,
| later broadcast - because Respawn was so powerless to
| stop the hacker(s).
|
| With more Unity shifting to a royalty model you're going
| to see a lot more interest in open source game engines
| like Godot; Godot is, for example, working on being
| usable for massive multiplayer and open-world games.
| davikr wrote:
| Indeed, I wish the first iteration gets released as GPL or
| something like that eventually. I get not wanting to open-
| source Source 2, but the original is another thing entirely.
| jsheard wrote:
| Most in-house game engines built after a certain point use a
| non-trivial amount of third party code, including console
| stuff which is under strict NDA, so it's a huge hassle to
| open source them. Most iterations of the Source engine use
| Havok physics for example.
|
| IdTech probably was only open sourced because Carmack pushed
| for it, but it helps that IdTech of that vintage was all in-
| house code exclusively targeting the PC. I think the only
| thing they had to cut out for legal reasons was the patented
| shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Even the original Doom source code release was the Linux
| source code because the Dos version of the game uses a 3rd
| party audio library, DMX.
| dcrazy wrote:
| I believe DMX was also used for Descent, and the company
| successfully shut down open source projects to reverse
| engineer the file format. Interplay was also extremely
| protective of their full-motion video codec, which only
| got well-documented after the release of Baldur's Gate
| II.
| phire wrote:
| Id were using a 3rd party sound library for Doom to handle
| the nitty-gritty aspects of DOS sound hardware, so the open
| source release was based on the linux port of Doom. People
| had to port it back to DOS.
|
| They couldn't release the windows port of Doom either, as
| that had been done by Microsoft, and would therefore
| include Microsoft copyrighted code.
|
| With Quake, Id did their own windows port, so it was
| possible to release the source code for winquake.
| stevage wrote:
| > as that had been done by Microsoft, and would therefore
| include Microsoft copyrighted code.
|
| How does that follow? Normally copyright would transfer
| to the company paying for it.
| nocman wrote:
| It all depends on how the contract between Microsoft and
| Id was worded.
| phire wrote:
| If Id had paid Microsoft to do the port, it would
| automatically be work-for-hire and the copyrights would
| belong to Id, unless the contract said otherwise.
|
| But Microsoft essentially licensed the Doom source code
| and ported it themselves, it's not work-for-hire, so the
| copyright on any changes would default to Microsoft.
| Though, I'm really not sure if Microsoft paid anything
| for this licence, or if there even was a contract.
| bitwize wrote:
| Microsoft weren't hired by Id to port Doom. They did so
| exclusively for their own purposes: to show off Windows
| 95 with DirectX as a performance gaming platform. They
| licensed the Doom engine, made their own changes, and
| released Doom 95 usable with a retail copy of the game
| assets.
|
| Oddly enough, the project of "porting Doom to Windows"
| was started by Gabe Newell, who worked at Microsoft at
| the time,
| ndiddy wrote:
| The wording used in the release notes was:
|
| > The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on
| linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a
| copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a
| mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly
| don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft
| did to windows.
|
| > Still, the code is quite portable, and it should be
| straightforward to bring it up on just about any
| platform.
|
| It seems like they just didn't have immediate access to
| the code for the Windows version. The DOS source code
| eventually leaked a couple years ago along with the code
| to the Mac port of Doom.
| https://archive.org/details/doom-mac-source
| tadfisher wrote:
| Fun fact: Gabe Newell built the original WinDoom port,
| and led the team that built Doom95!
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| That IS a fun fact.
| sho_hn wrote:
| To be clear, Robert Hess was the primary engineer on
| WinDoom, Newell was the team lead.
| gmueckl wrote:
| If a team had access to some licensed source code related
| the third party component (e.g. restrictively
| licensed/NDA'd sample code), clearing the engine source for
| release may involve a thorough code audit. Who is going to
| put in that work to prepare a freebie?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Probably because for it to be really opensource it has to
| have a proper documentation and other resources.
|
| if someone just does a `git push` and changes license it
| won't be much help to anyone until there is a proper
| documentation.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| Source has extensive documentation for years, both by Valve
| and modders. Mostly unified and indexed here:
| https://developer.valvesoftware.com
| deadbabe wrote:
| It will be easier to understand when you see the hundreds of
| Jira tickets to wade through to get it released and the fact
| they have better shit to do that contributes directly to
| revenue instead of trying to open source an old game engine
| that only a handful of people will even care about.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed.
| It is not an exciting engine to work with in any way.
|
| Source uses Havok, which is a licensed middleware. Convincing
| Havok to be also open source is likely a nonstarter. Repeat
| for any other middlewares they might have used, such as
| Adobe's ScaleForm used by CSGO, and it quickly is just an
| endless legal nightmare. idTech handled this by either
| spending time to rip out those components, allowing for a
| _partial_ open source release which is what you 're ripping
| on Valve for doing right this moment, or by avoiding using
| any licensed middlewares _at all_ which is a significant
| development limitation that not everyone can get away with.
|
| As Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed
| alternatives, it's _possible_ we might see that open sourced
| in the future. Who knows.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| You are right. But I wonder how much of Havok is there,
| given that Valve had its own thing:
| https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VPhysics
| meibo wrote:
| Most commercial engines that use libraries like havok
| will wrap them in some sort of internal library like this
| one to shield themselves from types from the middleware
| leaking into engine code, implementing convenience
| wrappers, and making it easier to update/swap them at
| some point if they ever wish to.
|
| There is a third-party implementation of vphysics based
| on an open source physics engine, for example - so for
| Valve that seems to have been successful:
| https://github.com/misyltoad/VPhysics-Jolt
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Havok also strikes me as a rather difficult piece to
| replace. A physics engine will often have hardcoded
| handling of special cases, and things can be sensitive to
| lots of numerical details.
|
| Haven't played TF2 but at least HL2 relies heavily on
| physics for gameplay, so while replacing the rendering
| engine might lead to rendering artifacts which can be
| annoying but tolerable in many cases, replacing the physics
| engine will probably lead to game-breaking issues.
|
| One could reverse engineer it, but then you're into
| copyright territory...
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed
| alternatives
|
| Do you have a link for this? I know the sound system is
| theirs as they open sourced it.[0] What about physics?
|
| Also, I agree that they should open source Source 2 if
| possible. They gain almost nothing by having it closed
| source and gain a lot by giving developers a better deal
| than Unreal because more money saved on the engine means
| either cheaper or better/long games. (At least assuming
| both engines are equivalent which they are not, but in
| theory.) Meanwhile Epic is using Unreal as a carrot for
| developers to release their games in Epic Store.[1]
|
| [0] https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24258723/epic-games-
| store...
| jsheard wrote:
| > What about physics?
|
| Source 2 dropped Havok in favor of their in-house Rubikon
| physics engine.
|
| https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Rubikon
| TransAtlToonz wrote:
| I'm no game developer, but I understand that Unreal comes
| with a _massive_ ecosystem of tools and third-party
| addons. It seems like it would take a company about the
| size of Valve (or much larger) to compete with that kind
| of platform. You seem to know more about the industry
| than I do, so could you explain what Valve competing with
| Unreal would actually look like? That seems almost like a
| completely different market than they 've been in so far
| despite certainly having the technical chops.
| keerthiko wrote:
| IMO the source engine codebase is probably chock-full of duct
| tape and cruft, full of undocumented, legacy, bespoke, hacky
| and deprecated stuff that it's not worth the dev resources
| for valve to bring it up to an OSS standard worthy of their
| reputation.
|
| Contributing to this is probably
|
| - custom external hooks (eg: homemade test framework,
| patchnotes publishing, steamapp backdoor integrations,
| hardware-specific firmware interfaces, 3rd party closed
| source SDK hooks)
|
| - assumptions about Valve's server
| architecture/implementation for most multiplayer stuff used
| by Valve games, the codebase(s) of which are probably as vast
| as Source itself and closed-source too
|
| - bespoke engine modifications made for specific games like
| HL2 or CS1.6 which hasn't been touched for a decade, the
| authors of which may not be accessible to document them
| trivially
|
| Adding sufficient documentation to a massive closed-source
| system meant for internal use, over multiple decades, to
| bring them up to par for functional OSS publication is a
| monumental feat that honestly probably isn't worth the risk
| of bad publicity from the modder community who'd just be mad
| about how unusable it would be.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Supposedly there's a texture of a coconut included in
| source games, along with either a filename or tagged with a
| comment to say that if it's removed then the game will
| break and noone knows why.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > There are at least 3 major open source alternatives today,
| way more powerful and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot,
| Wicked).
|
| My general impression from lurking on these kinds of threads
| (with no relevant personal experience) was that Godot is a
| good 2D engine but not a good 3D engine. Do you find it
| comparable to the other two?
| SXX wrote:
| IDK about Wicked, but with certain non-photorealism styles
| you can easily make well performing 3D game on Godot. You
| can check their showreel and there are plenty 3D games in
| it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Lon_Q2T18
| sho_hn wrote:
| _Road to Vostok_ is probably the most relevant Godot-
| based 3D game, since it 's a FPS.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atb3yFNazmU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIOmb1hseA
| jsheard wrote:
| Cruelty Squad is also a successful FPS title built with
| Godot, but its deliberately hideous aesthetic probably
| makes it the worst possible way to sell anyone on the
| merits of the engine.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| I unironically love cruelty squads aesthetic, its one of
| my favorite indie games in recent years. Even the store
| description calls it a "sewage infused garbage world"-
| and it is, but its also oddly charming, and perfectly
| suits the game's theme and atmosphere. Though its
| probably not very enjoyable for those with epilepsy
| rozab wrote:
| If those engines are so capable then why do no AAA games use
| them? Source is still (kinda) used in games like Apex Legends
| Nition wrote:
| Valve has given Facepunch the Source 2 license for S&Box[1]
| which will indirectly allow making games in Source 2. That's
| as far as they've gone towards releasing it as a game engine
| so far.
|
| [1]https://sbox.game or
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/
| greenchair wrote:
| maybe its release could lead to more attacks or cheating?
| thetoon wrote:
| Maybe that's where a project like Nuclide could step in? I'm
| always a bit confused between their projects' names, but I've
| read somewhere they had progress on the HL2 front.
| pityJuke wrote:
| What is Nuclide? I've found
| https://github.com/VeraVisions/nuclide and
| https://github.com/eukara/freehl.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm still a bit confused on why Source is close sourced when
| Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago. I suppose it'd
| becsuse there's some basic overlap, but they still also feel
| comfortable releasing their gsmes' source?
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > when Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago.
|
| I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be
| used to justify having Source2 open as well.
|
| After all, what value is there in keeping the game code
| private at all? The only things I can think of are a)
| anticheat, b) NDA'd 3rd party code, and c) protecting
| important secret sauces made by the company itself
|
| a) and b) are both solved by simply not releasing those
| portions of the code, while c) is a bit moot. Any competitor
| can already (legally) RE the binaries and recreate any juicy
| proprietary algorithms, unless they're patented. But in that
| case they would be protected even if the source was released
| so it's still the same situation.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| b) can get dicey, depending on how hard the 3rd party in
| question wants to defend their copyrights. _Google v.
| Oracle_ was resolved on the basis of being transformative,
| not on the basis of class and function declarations being
| too insignificant to copyright. So if you can 't even keep
| the 3rd-party headers, you're left with a bunch of function
| calls that you have to piece together the meaning of.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| You could just strip out all mentions of the 3rd party
| component on the codebase. Let the community figure out
| how to plug in a replacement.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Let the community figure out how to plug in a
| replacement._
|
| Far more likely the community kicks up a huge stink about
| how Valve released a crippled engine.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can
| be used to justify having Source2 open as well.on
|
| I'm not fully up to date but I'm under the impression that
| Source 2 is currently used by their modern games. I don't
| think that's the case for Source 1. The same logic wouldn't
| apply.
|
| >After all, what value is there in keeping the game code
| private at all?
|
| Pretty much what you said. It's all down to cost-benefit at
| the end of the day and of they think there's more cost
| (perceived or otherwise) to releasing source 2 code they
| won't bother.
| progbits wrote:
| Given the leaks, the fact it's been over 10 years since last
| major game released using Source 1, and the fact most of the
| rendering code (probably the most valuable bits, aside from
| physics) in Source2 must have been rewritten given the new
| developments in game graphics; makes me wonder if there is any
| reason for them to keep it closed source.
|
| Do you think they will release it at any point? Maybe there are
| licensing issues where they don't have the rights to all of it
| and couldn't easily opensource it. Or maybe there is in fact
| still too much secret sauce left there?
| bayindirh wrote:
| There's always "too much secret sauce". I remember a time
| when CryTek published papers about how they implemented
| things, now they don't.
|
| There's always in-house ways to deal with graphics drivers
| and certain effects. Remember how Source 1 was _the only
| engine_ which was able to render HDR with measly ATI 9600XT,
| without a performance penalty most of the time?
|
| You carry this know how in evolved form for generations, and
| it gets buried under as the foundation of the new things
| you're building on top of it.
|
| This is what I remember from a friend who implemented his own
| game engine and created a company for it, and half the woes
| were making the graphics drivers and processors behave as
| they said in their manuals.
| kvirani wrote:
| Isn't UE4/5 fully source available?
| bayindirh wrote:
| You need to get a license to get the source. When you pay
| for the license, you also agree that you won't share that
| source.
|
| ID's engines are always called "The world's most
| expensive xcopy". You always get the source, but you
| never share it.
|
| Same model. Get the license, get the source.
|
| See the relevant page at:
| https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-
| engine/...
|
| From that page:
|
| > This page provides detailed instructions for
| _subscribers_ to download the source code for Unreal
| Engine (UE) from the Unreal Engine GitHub repository, and
| to get started working with the code.
|
| (Emphasis mine)
| jsheard wrote:
| The UE4/UE5 source code _is_ only available under
| license, but the bar to acquire said license couldn 't
| possibly be lower. You just connect a GitHub account,
| click through a EULA, and automatically get access to
| almost* the entire source code for free.
|
| * The NDA'ed console bits are hidden of course but all
| the PC code is there. Not just release snapshots either,
| you can see all of Epics commits in real time.
| bayindirh wrote:
| But it's source available, and it's not free software,
| correct?
|
| It's just free as in beer.
|
| "Click through EULA" is the mammoth in the room.
| jsheard wrote:
| Yes it's source available, not true free software.
| Kvirani never said it's free software though.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's not open source but it is free
| beeflet wrote:
| Good news everyone! They've already tried to reverse engineer
| the source engine for TF2 for some success!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09CvpQrnTEY
| chedabob wrote:
| Damn, was hoping this would bring TF2 back to Mac. Haven't had
| a good LAN party in the office since Apple dropped 32-bit
| support.
| andrepd wrote:
| Do people even do LAN parties anymore? x)
| jsheard wrote:
| They do, but "LAN" has become a bit of a misnomer since few
| games actually have real LAN play options anymore. If
| you're playing modern titles then you end up with a bunch
| of PCs or consoles in the same room all connecting to a
| remote server over the internet. Internet connections are a
| lot better than they were back in the day at least.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Dang, wouldn't you run into serious internet problems
| with that? Do modern games use that much data? Could a
| single internet service handle 6 simultaneous
| connections?
| FreebasingLLMs wrote:
| Really is not that much data involved (not counting
| downloading the game itself). Streaming multi-player game
| data to/from an individual player can range from like
| 10kbps to 100kbps depending on the game and scale
| involved. Remember you are only sending the deltas (and
| occasional entire refreshes).
| lnauta wrote:
| I'm still not quite sure how to take this, does this mean that:
|
| We can not fix problematic netcode (this is a running joke in
| the TF2 comminity)
|
| We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed
| through configs)?
| xyst wrote:
| Source engine is so outdated at this point anyways. Valve
| should use the profits from their cash cow, CSGO, and use it to
| invest in retooling with open source engines such as GoDot or
| Bevy.
|
| I remember downloading a leaked version of the source code for
| source engine, and in general it was laughable at how awful it
| was. I dont know if it was ever discussed mainstream but only
| based on recollection of IRC chats.
|
| I think it was about 6 months out of date, but even so it would
| explain why HL sequels would become vaporware despite years of
| teasing the community by Gabe Newell himself.
| somehnguy wrote:
| They're already using Source 2 -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| In case you're not aware, CSGO was replaced by CS2, which
| uses Source 2.
| anacrolix wrote:
| oh that's lame :(
| LorenDB wrote:
| Valve just keeps on winning.
|
| I fear the day that Gaben dies/resigns. Hopefully Valve finds a
| worthy successor, but it's not unheard of for a company to lose
| its way after the original generation is gone.
| pityJuke wrote:
| Off-topic: this is genuinely cool, along with many things Valve
| do, but Valve does generate a significant amount from gambling
| (and underaged gambling) so I won't give a complete pass to
| being a great company.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| This is a little complicated. There are many companies that
| sell gambling products. Nothing special about that. The
| tragedy is when you list your game on Steam and it gets
| popular, you are paying Valve 30% for the privilege of
| finding new users for CSGO and DOTA2. That is how they make
| money.
| almatabata wrote:
| And with skin sales. Remember that Valve charges a Tax on
| every item sale. Every time you sell an Item like a skin on
| the steam market, valve takes a cut. If they crackdown on
| the gambling it will impact their bottom line.
|
| As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling
| products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa
| super team.
|
| Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that
| they could do more to protect against underage gambling.
| SXX wrote:
| I guess it will sounds like I being Valve advocate here,
| but it's just not only a bottom line. Valve simply dont
| have headcount to crackdown on many things and neither
| they have headcount to do lots of predatory stuff too.
|
| Valve is under 400 people and wast majority of them do
| not work on Steam or specific game like CSGO. Likely each
| project support team is like 30-50 people at most.
|
| To compare numbers for other companies in 2023-2024:
| * Epic Games - 4000 * Nintendo - 7,724 * Sony
| Interactive Entertainment - 12,700 * Take-Two
| Interactive - 12,371 * Electronic Arts - 13,700
| * Activision Blizzard - 17,000 * Mircosoft Gaming -
| 20,100
|
| Might be they do have to go to hire 100 more people to
| solve this problem and might be it's fully their fault,
| but expectations many people have of this certainly rich,
| but small company are not realistic.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also looking at things like pirate sites, it would be
| never ending process. Close one and lock the their
| inventories and 3 will popup somewhere else. It is
| unlikely to be solvable issue.
| almatabata wrote:
| Just because you cannot "solve" an issue, does not mean
| you should do nothing. By that logic valve should not
| implement VAC, because after all, cheaters will always
| find a way.
|
| They play the anti-cheat game of cat and mouse, because
| if they do not, users will stop playing. No one wants to
| play with cheaters unless they are cheating.
|
| They could definitely invest some resources into this.
| But they have no monetarily incentive thus they do
| nothing. I fully expect legal action or fear of it, will
| eventually make them do something.
| almatabata wrote:
| They can definitely hire 2-5 people to do something, and
| at least try to crack down.
| beeflet wrote:
| Yeah the 30% cut is insane, and its surprising to me that
| game publishers tolerate it under steam. But if you look at
| the PC games market, you can clearly be successful doing
| the "self publish" route like Minecraft did.
|
| I think just means that valve has turned their DRM into a
| value-add for the consumer with cloud backups and item
| trading and such convenience features. And I say this as
| someone who uses GOG. You look at other competitors like
| Epic Games Store or EA or whatever and the user interface
| is bloated and slow, and it is just a pain to use.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Publishers have discovered that pc gamers prefer Steam
| over all other platforms. Basically all the big
| publishers are back on Steam or entering it. After trying
| to manage outside.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Traditional publishers before Steam took even more - this
| is why companies tolerate it.
| MonitorBird wrote:
| Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to
| redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without
| spending it? In that case isn't the entire game industry
| guilty of trying to rip money from the credit cards of
| unsuspecting parents? Isn't the entire modern web just a tool
| to suck cash out of cards, or try and get your card sucked?
| What are we talking about here. I cut my teeth on CS:S, but
| haven't played much after that. I know the newer games have
| lootbox mechanics, but I assumed it was for items you could
| potentially grind? Just like.. every other modern online
| multiplayer money sucking game that exists. Warframe,
| Fortnite, Roblox, I dunno. Everything these days seems to be
| a bloodsucker. Steam gets a full pass from me, I'm not a
| prude.
| pityJuke wrote:
| > Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to
| redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without
| spending it?
|
| Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results
| in a couple of downstream effects:
|
| 1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded
| for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people
| to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items
| have been sold for >$1m [0]).
|
| 2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate
| for money in casinos, or for sports betting.
|
| 3. This can even lead to money laundering [1].
|
| As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites
| running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for
| a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use
| that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on
| literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know
| because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even
| cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt
| to do identity validation.
|
| Some video resources that might be useful:
|
| - Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
|
| - People Make Games:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g
|
| [0]: https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-
| sells-for-o...
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50262447
| chipgap98 wrote:
| And Valve should get rid of item trading because it could
| potentially be used this way?
|
| Edit: this is a genuine question. What is the solution
| here?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It is used this way. Whether you think valve should
| remove it depends on your disposition on gambling.
| pityJuke wrote:
| Like, if Valve do want to keep item trading in (and
| potentially be used this way is an understatement, these
| are multi-million dollar gambling businesses), they could
| at least try to stop them.
|
| Valve's enforcement was one round of C&Ds in 2016 (!),
| and then some technical measures [0] in 2024. For Valve
| to take heed the problem, they literally had to have a
| stage invasion at their esport event [1].
|
| [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/730/view/418
| 56069942...
|
| [1]: https://internettalk.xyz/blog/cults-vendettas-
| gambling-how-a... - article I published, Coffeezilla also
| has a video on this event:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q58dLWjRTBE
| jorvi wrote:
| You throw a $8-$15 into the case slot machine (by buying a
| key), it usually gives you a crap prize, sometimes its a
| decent prize, and once every 100 000 - 1 000 000 times you
| get something great.
|
| You can wrangle that with words in any way you want, its
| gambling. Same for Team Fortress 2 and stuff like hats.
| keoneflick wrote:
| I think a few replies have missed a key issue: Valve's CS
| monetization is the worst in the industry.
|
| Most current monetization for cosmetics allows you to both
| (1) grind for items without paying anything and (2) if you
| want to pay, show you exactly what you are paying for.
|
| Even games that still use lootboxes (i.e. don't follow #2)
| allow you to grind for items.
|
| CS is one of the very few (or only current) game where you
| can't get a cosmetic without paying (must purchase keys to
| open lootboxes) and you don't know what you are getting
| (lootboxes).
|
| It's bad and there is no excuse.
|
| The trading mechanic, which adds a real world value to
| these cosmetics, and encourages players to pay for
| lootboxes makes it worse.
|
| People sometimes hate on popular games like Fortnite and
| COD, but they have way better/more fair monetization
| practices.
| Toqoz_ wrote:
| > CS is one of the very few (or only current) game where
| you can't get a cosmetic without paying (must purchase
| keys to open lootboxes) and you don't know what you are
| getting (lootboxes).
|
| You get dropped items through playtime which you can sell
| on the community market to gain steam wallet funds, which
| you can then use to purchase most other cosmetics or even
| games.
| keoneflick wrote:
| I do not believe CS:GO free tier had any cosmetic drops,
| only lootbox drops. But I certainly could be mistaken. In
| either case, any truly free cosmetics were much rarer
| than other games.
| beeflet wrote:
| Having played TF2 and such as a kid, the bottleneck was
| always asking your parents for their credit card or getting
| steam cards/vanilla credit cards for your birthday.
|
| I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't
| really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast
| that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see
| how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top
| trumps" and pokemon cards and such).
|
| Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet
| porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff
| like loot boxes.
|
| I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually
| adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's
| savings into a game.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of
| internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-
| adjacent stuff like loot boxes.
|
| I think that's more because people don't want to teach
| children about sex, while people do demonstrate what
| gambling is early on. Ones much more complex and if you're
| letting a kid find their own answers unguided, that can
| potentially be disasterous.
|
| That's not even mentioning theneffect of instilling shame
| on your own biological body and treating parts of it as
| taboo. If parents refuse to talk about something, it can be
| taken as either a bad thing, a scary thing, or a
| complicated thing.
| Funes- wrote:
| >I think that's more because people don't want to teach
| children about sex
|
| Come on now. It's hard to find anything more immediately
| exciting and alluring than sex, especially for teenagers.
| The biological imperatives and inclinations are too
| strong regarding sex for virtually everyone, compared to
| anything related to gambling. And OP is absolutely right
| that the barrier to entry is a great deterrent in the
| case of gambling, as well. Just based on that alone,
| easy-access, sex-related stuff is always going to have a
| potentially greater effect on almost anyone, regardless
| of their previous knowledge about it or warnings received
| by other people during their childhood.
|
| >people do demonstrate what gambling is early on
|
| Talk about going out on a limb. What are you basing this
| affirmation on? I don't see any parents lending any word
| of advice to their children about gambling-like
| activities, in any case, as most of them indulge in those
| themselves, let alone their own kids.
| culi wrote:
| Also they still take a huge cut of profits from game sales.
| That's 30% of each sale going to the platform (compared to
| 12% by Epic). Indie game devs suffer if people don't opt to
| buy directly or from platforms like itch.io
|
| But they have a near-monopoly on the pc gaming market so
| selling on Steam is a must
| dralley wrote:
| At least they're funding a lot of useful open source
| development with that money pile.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's okay, if you're a AAA company with something like like
| 25-50m in sales, y9u get a tax cut to 20%
|
| When you put it that way, the model makes so much more
| sense to matching how the US operates.
| jsheard wrote:
| In a sense it's worse than that - when the mega-publishers
| started leaving Steam in favor of their own stores with
| better margins, Valve conceded by introducing a tiered
| system where their cut drops to 25% after $10M in sales and
| again to 20% after $50M in sales. It's deliberately
| structured to give a discount to the mega-corps which least
| need it (EA, Ubisoft, etc) while ensuring that indies with
| no leverage over Valve mostly remain on the 30% bracket.
|
| Even more ironically those indies typically use negligible
| amounts of Steams infrastructure, while the AAA games which
| enjoy the 20% revenue share are the ones regularly pushing
| 200GB downloads though Steams servers.
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| 30% may be a lot but you get more than a store page;
|
| - anticheat
|
| - voice chat, friend list, ...
|
| - matchmaking
|
| - marketplace for mods, maps, skins, ...
|
| - clips and videos
|
| - forums/ discussion board
|
| - cloud saves
|
| - rankings
|
| An indie would have to implement and host those by itself
| or rely on third party services.
|
| https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/
| BoorishBears wrote:
| The problem is the margins are so high these digital
| storefront cuts almost become arbitrary. So to try and
| come up with a somewhat objective measure... 30% is too
| much based on their _own_ historical pricing.
|
| Steam was taking 30% when they did heavy curation and
| hand picked every game. At that point being on Steam was
| probably as valuable as a traditional publisher
| distribution wise because just being on Steam assured
| some level of quality.
|
| Greenlight was the start of the decline in that value,
| and then with Steam Direct its just officially insane
| that they're still pricing their cut at the same rates
| they did at launch.
|
| The value adds you listed also got much easier to build
| over time and got commoditized. EGS offers most of that
| for free for example, sans gambling enabling
| marketplaces.
| kibwen wrote:
| Especially relevant to this conversation is that TF2 is the
| game that single-handedly popularized the lootbox model
| outside of Korea.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Also, their primary reason for existence is to add DRM to
| software.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Well, no, Steam provides a bunch of services to gamedevs
| that might be tied to an account, like matchmaking or mod
| support. But if the games don't use that they're not
| encumbered. I've got a bunch of hours in KSP that aren't on
| my account because I launched the exe through the CKAN mod
| manager rather than Steam
| koolala wrote:
| A win would be supporting TF2 Source 2.
| beeflet wrote:
| Maybe the next step is releasing TF3 or some competitor game
| to overtake TF2
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why? TF2 looks and performs amazing.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| If his son inherits Valve, it's over. He will probably sell it
| because why not -- he's not a gamer whatsoever.
| nicce wrote:
| It is less about gaming but more about understanding what is
| best for the end users.
| MisterTea wrote:
| To me Valve lost its way as a game developer long ago. What
| have they released recently? CS 2 in 2023? That IP came from a
| mod they bought 25 years ago just like every other game they
| released since HL. The only thing "new" have in the pipeline is
| a MOBA FPS.
|
| I am however eternally grateful Steam allows me to painlessly
| run Windows games on Linux so I never have to deal with MS in
| my personal life ever again. As a game distributor they are
| awesome. And that is what Valve does best, distribute games.
| AlphaCerium wrote:
| if by "DOTA FPS" you mean their new MOBA Deadlock, AFAIK it's
| not related to DOTA in any way.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Thanks. Yes, I mixed up the acronyms.
| hbn wrote:
| Yeah seems to me Valve almost entirely stopped being a game
| developer in the early 2010s after Dota 2. Which I suppose
| more or less coincides with when PC gaming became a real
| mainstream alternative to consoles in the gaming space, and
| it became beneficial to lock themselves in as the PC gaming
| platform provider.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I don't know why you think it's Gabe that has the most impact,
| most of the original team behind Half-Life are gone, and people
| didn't buy their products for Steam. They bought their games.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| I'd argue the opposite and that Gabe needs to retire (and
| hopefully have Robin Walker take over).
|
| Valve's release cycle has slowed down to almost nothing, and
| are just feeding off their cash cows. Gabe is 62 and seems more
| interested in his Neuralink competitor.
| foxandmouse wrote:
| The fact that they did this before bothering to recompile it for
| 64-bit Mac says a lot--Valve clearly doesn't see Apple as a
| friendly place to do business. Makes sense, with Apple trying to
| lock game devs into the App Store.
| ender341341 wrote:
| from various interviews I've seen of folks in the games
| industry apple has historically been actively hostile to
| working with game companies, it seems to have softened with the
| iphone appstore.
|
| People make fun of "devs devs devs" from Balmer but he was
| heavily right, Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and
| they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
| foxandmouse wrote:
| Don't think that's the case anymore, "Game Porting Toolkit 2"
| seemingly opened the floodgates on gaming on a mac.. It's up
| to the developers if they think it's worth the time/ effort;
| but with how great apple the hardware is, and how easy it is
| to port a game, I think we're going to see a huge influx of
| mac gaming.
| jsheard wrote:
| Isn't the Game Porting Toolkit still under that weird
| license where developers are only allowed to use the
| DirectX translation layer for "evaluation purposes"? End-
| users can use it to run Windows games if they want, but
| AFAICT developers are categorically not allowed to build
| their own ports around it, they still have to port their
| game over to Metal the hard way.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Given developers' experiences with Apple Arcade[1] I'm not
| holding my breath. Either Apple just doesn't really care
| about gaming, or they're culturally unable to provide an
| environment that would attract game developers. No amount
| of game porting toolkits will help with this. iPhone still
| gets plenty of (mobile) games simply because the potential
| audience is too big to ignore. The Mac doesn't have this
| luxury.
|
| [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/01/apple-arcade-
| frustratio...
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It's not going to happen. No one feels that way in the
| industry.
| imiric wrote:
| > Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a
| monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
|
| I think "courting" is underselling what they actually did.
|
| They invested heavily into building tooling and APIs
| specifically for games, which eventually powered their own
| gaming console. They were practically the only company doing
| this on PCs since the mid '90s, and they became a monopoly
| because nobody else was focused on this. Developers and
| consumers jumped aboard because there was nowhere else to go.
| This is the same reason Steam won. For many years, there were
| just no alternatives.
|
| Microsoft gets a lot of flack for many things, but they
| deserve a ton of credit for inventing and supporting the PC
| gaming landscape as we know it today.
| thefz wrote:
| Exactly. DirectX is what, 25-30 years old?
| madrox wrote:
| As much as I'd like to give Microsoft credit for this, I
| don't think they deserve it. There's multiple historical
| writeups documenting how management had written off Windows
| as a gaming platform and did not support the original
| DirectX project. If it weren't for the tenacity of the
| original three DirectX engineers who basically did this as
| a passionate side project the gaming landscape would look a
| lot different. Microsoft got this monopoly somewhat in
| spite of itself.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Mac accounts for 1.4% of users, which is 25% less than Linux...
|
| That is actually more than I thought, but its clear without
| compatible games there is very little reason to install Steam.
|
| Also, Apple only recently started to be more gaming friendly,
| so it's really not surprising they would try to port a 20 year
| old game.
| Kovah wrote:
| > without compatible games
|
| About 30% of the games I own on Steam would run on my Mac. I
| think that's quite much for a platform that nobody likes to
| develop for. But to be fair, I have few mainstream games like
| CoD, LoL or whatever.
| isametry wrote:
| (This is probably terribly obvious, but should be mentioned
| anyway: that's 1.4% Mac and 2.06% Linux users _of Steam_. Not
| users in general.)
| heliophobicdude wrote:
| Do you still also need to compile a mac build on a Mac?
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| You're over-analyzing it. TF2 is 17 years old, and basically
| has a skeleton crew keeping it running. They simply decided
| it's not worth the effort. I'm mad about it too, but hard to
| blame them.
| pityJuke wrote:
| The official blog post:
| https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
|
| (Also includes links to recent updates for other Source engine
| titles)
| Lammy wrote:
| I hope this is good news for TF2 Classic.
|
| edit: here's the announcement from the TF2C Discord:
|
| ==============
|
| @everyone We'll have more to say later, but you might not be able
| to launch TF2 Classic for a little bit due to the massive SDK
| update and public release of Team Fortress 2's code.
|
| We're already preparing for the porting efforts and a potential
| Steam release now that we've been legally enabled to pursue that,
| but in the meantime, you will have to shift Source SDK Base 2013
| Multiplayer to the "previous2021" beta branch that still has the
| previous revision of the SDK files to continue playing. See the
| screenshot for an example.
|
| Thank you, and we'll have more news soon!
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Given they call out derivative works of the original games
| being ok, and those works can be released as new games on steam
| seems to clear the way for TF2 Classic.
| beeflet wrote:
| Woah... woah WOAH I wasn't expecting to see this on HN. I've been
| expecting this for a long time, and if I was valve I would have
| done something like this a long time ago: release a "final"
| celebratory content update, port the game to vulkan, and open
| source the codebase (keeping the item servers and whatnot tied to
| valve's servers). I don't know if this is the beginning of the
| end or the end of the beginning of TF2. There have been leaks
| before but this is huge news.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| > Woah... woah WOAH
|
| I see what you did there
| HaZeust wrote:
| Beginning of the end? It's been the end for years - they're
| passing it off to the community, as they should! The team for
| TF2 is probably very low double digits now and it's almost 18
| years old, it's time to outsource the continuing developments.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| > The team for TF2 is probably very low double digits now
|
| Double digits? That's very very optimistic. It's closer to
| like two people.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Ok, well, the more the reason!
| beeflet wrote:
| thats more than double digits if you counting the hands at
| the keyboard
| skupig wrote:
| The entire TF2 team was famously one guy for years
| sophacles wrote:
| The janitor did the best work they could... it was just too
| much for any one human.
| 65 wrote:
| Wondering if this is so Valve doesn't have to keep updating TF2.
| It's a 17 year old game and the last real update was Jungle
| Inferno in 2017. I wonder if it's going to turn into more of a
| community maintained "sandbox" game.
| sylware wrote:
| Meanwhile... the "steam client" on elf/linux is still 32bits and
| hardcoded for x11/GL (nope, no tables of functions with
| wayland/vulkan/gpu fallbacks...) ... and don't forget about those
| bash-only scripts carefully using all those (often GNU) niche
| options of commands...
|
| Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount
| namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the
| "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries,
| namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the
| binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the
| readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of
| core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically
| linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]).
|
| Oh and lately, I had to build the original lsof command to please
| the steam webhelper... and there is a liblsof library they could
| have linked statically...
|
| Valve "linux" devs should be worry putting "valve" on their
| resume, this could backfire... seriously.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| The game appears to have been renamed "Frog Fortress 2".
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2...
| jsheard wrote:
| I'd guess that's to distinguish it from the official TF2 if you
| build and install the code without changing the name.
| James_K wrote:
| I wonder if they'll start accepting pull requests. There are a
| lot of bugs I'd like to see fixing in the game. I've been annoyed
| by the Medigun beam not lining up with the model for about ten
| years by this point.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| I really really really doubt it. But hopefully someone can
| champion a community fork of the game which runs on Steam.
| SXX wrote:
| I feel like under every news regarding Valve, Steam or their
| games people tend to find some crazy conspiracies on why Valve
| did that or didn't do this. When actual truth is that Valve is
| ~400 people company plus some contractor artists making items for
| CSGO / Dota / etc.
|
| Valve is not 40,000+ company, not even 4,000+. 400 people. That's
| it.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Well, now this makes me feel old that I thought TFC was the bee's
| knees and felt TF2 was too new fangled and fancy so I never got
| into it.
| sophacles wrote:
| There's still people getting into it right now, in 2025. It's
| not too late (and it's a lot of fun...).
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| As someone who used mod TF2 on the server side, this is
| fantastic. I've spent countless hours analyzing the binaries in
| IDA and now you can just open github. This will definitely
| accelerate new features and bugfixes from the community.
|
| It's about damn time, really. The TF2 source code has already
| leaked twice. And a group even made a cloned version of the game
| in an earlier version of the engine. The community support this
| game still has is massive.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Was this an accident? Why is the link to a github diff? Why is
| there no announcement?
| wiseowise wrote:
| So that's why they didn't challenge TF2C this time, it's all
| coming together.
| njintje wrote:
| This is the final nail in the coffin for Team Fortress 2, isn't
| it?
| neuroelectron wrote:
| TF3 confirmed jk
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Valve be like:
|
| Initial commit
|
| +1153568 -222431 lines changed
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