Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam | Hacker News Reader

Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam

openttd.org

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Later: An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47442834 - March 2026 (146 comments)

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This doesn't feel right for me. OpenTTD is so much superior in every way compared to the original TTD, that noone in their right mind would ever play the original. So Atari now, while spending zero effort compared to the years of work that OpenTTD devs put in, will basically sell OpenTTD as if was their own creation. People who buy the new TTD will simply play OpenTTD anyway, since it's so much better.

I might be wrong, but it feels like Atari are like parasites in this situation feeding off the hard work of OpenTTD devs.

The downsides of putting “TTD” in the name “OpenTTD” is a certain level of vulnerability to the original creator (or a rights inheritor) deciding it’s worth their time to care again someday. I suspect this will do more for the TTD community than it will harm it, though; any modern sale of TTD is targeted precisely at the folks who would take mortal offense at harm to OpenTTD, and $10 (which would have been merely $5 in 2000) is the opposite of egregious after 100% inflation pushed AAA games towards $90 these days. I paid $5 for a used copy of SimTower back then, I would happily pay the same today for TTD resources, so this is all fine.

I get that Atari isn’t perhaps as loved as, say, Bullfrog or Dynamix, but better that companies respect their properties and their fans with an outcome like this, than be another boringly-common community-destroying Nintendo Lawyer Takedown Club.

(It’s also now in line with the various WAD and Descent games over time that used this model, where the engine is maximum rewrite amazing but the game resources require a GOG purchase. The point of rewrites isn’t to deprive the games of revenue!)

The modern Atari has no relation to the original Atari. They’re essentially copyright trolls. I do not believe we owe them any moral obligation for the works they bought from the original Atari via a series of many intermediaries.

> It’s also now in line with the various WAD and Descent games over time that used this model, where the engine is maximum rewrite amazing but the game resources require a GOG purchase.

I don't know about Descent, but this hasn't been true wrt Doom for decades: https://freedoom.github.io/about.html

FreeDoom, like OpenTTD, walks a fine line between ‘artistic reimplementation’ and ‘legally vulnerable’ due precisely to reimplementing art assets, yes.

It's similar to Valve and Dota2. We all know what it means but officially, it isn't actually DotA and doesn't stand for anything. They will never refer to the game as Defense of the Ancients. Seems to have worked for them.

Worth noting that the Atari of today is a shell corporation that has precisely zero to do with the original.

IceFrog was on the Dota2 team, and valve owns the trademark

It's far more complicated than that and ended up in court. They own the commercial rights after a legal battle with Blizzard (and Riot was in the fray, somewhere), who retained some rights to the name. Valve's 'Dota' doesn't legally stand for anything because it'd be a direct reference to Warcraft 3 (Ancients), just as TTD can be said to not legally stand for Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

That's the entire point that you've simultaneously acknowledged and missed.

IceFrog didn't start DotA, either. He had no claim to the name.

TL;DR there's complicated history behind it and much money was spent arguing over it.

IIRCC, Eul, the guy who made Dota originally, also works at Valve.

It's also worth noting that the original TTD had nothing to do with the original Atari and a lot more to do with Microprose which was purchased by Hasbro Interactive, which was later purchased by Infogrames which renamed itself Atari after buying the remnants. Oh, and the "new" Microprose has even less to do with the old Microprose than the new Atari does with the old Atari (at least they own the rights to all the old Atari titles).

I can look at this from 2 additional perspectives:

- OpenTTD (a game I truly love and have followed since before the 0.3 days) was not born as a clean-room reimplementation of TTD. It started as a disassembly effort, something which is perhaps morally gray, especially if you take into account the original TTD was coded in assembly (with sprinkles of C). Perhaps this way there is some vague contribution that goes towards Chris Sawyer?

- This is a way you can legally get the original graphics of the game (GRF). Although I think the shareware version technically also worked...

Atari didn't put in the effort, but Chris Sawyer did. Now Atari paid Sawyer for the rights to the game. I do not think Atari is a parasite here just because they paid for the game instead of creating it.

It seems to me that the logical outcome of your interpretation is that Sawyer's leniency towards the OpenTTD devs would be punished by losing exclusivity to his IP. Essentially, you are asserting "squatter's rights" to IP - if IP rights are not enforced, then they lapse. This is an interesting idea in principle, but I'm concerned that it might have prevented OpenTTD from ever being created. Original creators would be incentivized to chase off derivative works to protect their IP.

My issue with this argument is that I'm not sure how much of OpenTTD is their IP. OpenTTD has been development for so long that I doubt that any original disassembly remnants remain in the latest version of OpenTTD. The only true piece of IP that OpenTTD may use is the name (the TTD part of OpenTTD) and the graphics, the latter of which being the more important one. However, as far as I know, OpenTTD devs have created their own version of all the assets that are also much higher resolution compared to the original. As a result, I see OpenTTD as an entirely separate game, that's been heavily inspired by original, but is its own separate entity.

If you take an essay, and rewrite every paragraph and also add some new words, then it's still plagiarism. Perhaps not under copyright law, but ethically. OpenTTD goes beyond "heavily inspired" because it is intended to reimplement the original game.

I am sympathetic to arguments of the form "It was abandonware," "Copyright lasts for too long anyways," etc. But I don't think you can claim OpenTTD owes nothing to the creators of TTD. OpenTTD was meant to replace TTD and would not exist without it.

It's not plagiarism when you openly credit the original.

Making a clone of a video game, even with some substantial changes, may not actually be legal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int....

Also "TTD" is hardly a name you can claim. It's three letters that don't make a word.

As long as it officially stands for nothing, perhaps. See DotA vs Dota2.

KFC would like a word.

What "leniency"? It's not like OpenTTD contains any TTD IP

that would require some confirmation from a court

the standards for originality changed substantially twice in the timeframe we are talking about (recently, in 2023, the Supreme Court made it more strict, reversing a ruling from the 90s)

but still, what counts as sufficiently transformative is a very complicated question, especially when it comes to this kind of thematically identical but still creatively innovative derivative works

I remember how many years artists spent on the NewGRF packs, to make them high definition, what to add, what to keep, what to reimagine, and how! and of course the same goes for the game mechanics, the UI, the ... pathfinding, the economics (prices for freight, but also now there's a supply and demand system too, right?)

but the original behavior is still kept, so that's more clearly derivative (a copy), and in this case the new additions might be a new original work on their own, but still for OpenTTD to be able to be distributed without infringement of the original TTD it either needs to license that work for redistribution or remove the infringing parts.

(and of course it's a layman's analysis, so ...)

The Atari that may have paid for development no longer exists. This is a skin suit of a legal entity.

Before OpenTDD was ready, the improved signals and etc were originally part of "TTDPatch", which made the original 'model railroad' much more fun. So I stuck with that for a long time. They should at least ship the patch with the original game.

> Atari

> parasites

This is pretty typical for Atari... any software that ever graced their consoles magically becomes their IP, ripe for exploitation, even if they didn't write it...

> while spending zero effort

Why do you think it took such little effort? Is it simply utilizing an emulation/portability package like Proton?

I assume they will take the original and most likely unchanged TTD binaries and package them together with DOSBox and that's it. It's something that one dev could do in a weekend.

Yes, it is.

How do you feel about old Lucas arts adventure games that are purchasable on gog and other platforms and come bundled with scummvm?

I see no issue with it. The same way I see no issue selling old DOS games packaged with DOSBox. Neither ScummVM nor DOSBox are games themselves. In this case it's the content that matters.

However in OpenTTDs case, the entire implementation is original (including the new high res assets).

I would have 0 issues with this TTD/OpenTTD situation if OpenTTD was left on Steam as-is and TTD was a separate purchase that granted the original assets for use in OpenTTD.

unfortunately it's not that simple, especially as long as the original behavior is still in there

and ... successfully defending the originality of the reimplementation as a standalone work would be a risky and costly legal endeavor

(even though the standards for originality - "is it transformative enough?" was more lenient when OpenTTD was made than it's today)

>Scummvm

Scummvm could adapt OpenTTD for their own working in the exact same way as OpenTTD. They did that with Ultima.

Obviously having OpenTTD available for free on Steam would jeopardize Atari's paid rerelease of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, so I think this is a good compromise. Hopefully they rigged it up so the assets from Transport Tycoon Deluxe get picked up automatically by OpenTTD when you install the bundle. I also hope that Atari will be sharing some of the revenue from the bundle with the OpenTTD team as part of this arrangement. They've spent the last 20+ years adding nice quality of life features and keeping the game playable, and I think they deserve to be rewarded for that effort. Going back to stock TTD after playing OpenTTD feels like a massive downgrade, like going from vim to BSD vi.

I have nothing to base this on other than "it makes sense", but it seems like there has to be some form of revenue sharing here. OpenTTD is the reason why atari can even think this rerelease would work. I'm not saying there wouldn't be interest, but that I don't think any of the suits at atari would think to do this without OpenTTD keeping the interest there.

If there was any kind of revenue sharing, I'm sure it would have been in the OpenTTD announcement, and not the pure lawyer-speak version they did release.

why do you think a revenue sharing is more likely than Atari simply pushing around the volunteer project (and the OpenTTD project simply not risking any kind of legal conflict)?

It doesn't seem like a compromise. It seems like bullying

It would be nice if someone could provide some explanation as to why this situation is necessary. Did Atari's lawyers go full tilt?

Who knows, though I always thought that it was rather odd that OpenTTD was on Steam. I'm not sure whether that's because it is an open source remake or because you had to own the original for the graphics/sound assets back in the day. (Apparently that changed over 15 years ago!)

Even if Atari's lawyers were involved, it may have been a friendly exchange. The post claims that OpenTTD was available on Steam for 5 years. That is more than enough time for them to apply legal pressure. It's also worth noting that the open source version is still available from the project website, as are the open assets.

As someone who has been involved in OpenRCT2, which is another Chris Sawyer/Atari game, from what I can tell, Atari has a very hands off approach to these things.

We know they know about us - We saw their Head of PR giving away keys for RCT2 on Twitch while playing OpenRCT2, prior to the release of RCT World (What a terrible game sadly).

As far as we can tell, it's basically a "don't cause us problems and we won't bother you" situation.

> As far as we can tell, it's basically a "don't cause us problems and we won't bother you" situation.

In this case, the "problem" seems to be "we want to lazily cash in on an existing IP and you providing a better product for free on the same shelves as ours makes that difficult", with the "solution" being to agree to have the better (free) version bundled with the lesser (paid) version.

I suppose it's better than banning distribution of prebuilt executables outside Steam or suing the devs into bankruptcy (a lawsuit Atari would likely win), but at that point we're just comparing starting with a shakedown to starting with breaking kneecaps.

> In this case, the "problem" seems to be "we want to lazily cash in on an existing IP and you providing a better product for free on the same shelves as ours makes that difficult", with the "solution" being to agree to have the better (free) version bundled with the lesser (paid) version.

At least they want to "lazily cash in". A lot of gamers like to talk about preserving history, yet are critical the moment businesses preserve that history doing it the way businesses naturally do things (i.e. by selling a product).

Besides, we do not know what went on behind the scenes here. It could be anything from the open source developers voluntarily pulling their game from the store, to the publisher requesting they pull their game from the store, to the publisher threatening legal action. Heck, the publisher may have even paid the developers of OpenTTD to bundle their engine with TTD. While some scenarios are more likely than others, we are too quick to attribute actions and motivations based upon non-existent information.

I don't think anybody is blaming Atari for putting TTD on sale for money. Heck, I was even planning to buy it until they pulled the obnoxious stunt of removing OpenTTD.

And even that could've been okay if they actually explained what was going on, but it's all very hush hush, which does not instill trust and understanding. If they were transparent about motivations and reasoning, they'd likely catch a lot less flak for what's going on right now.

I think most people who still buy RTC only do so to get the assets for OpenRTC2.

Atari is in a really weird spot, the rights have changed hands so much.

It would be nice if they offered a paid version of OpenRTC with the assets bundled. Ohh well

You can just legally get the ones from the demo file in ZIP format.

Naw.

That's disrespectful to the spirit of Atari looking the other way.

I've own RC2 for a very very long time. Either way it's like 10$

The original one at home came with a PC gaming magazine, but sadly I lost that CD. Also if any I'd pay $5 for the OpenTTD authors and another $5 for the original creators.

> As far as we can tell, it's basically a "don't cause us problems and we won't bother you" situation.

Seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Respect for Atari.

I remember reading an interview some years ago where they basically said they wouldn't try to shut them down, but they also did not appreciate the projects existing.

If I recall that correctly, Atari didn't want to do anything about it because it drives sales for TTD and RCT (in the case of OpenRCT2, it drives sales for 2 games even, since you need the assets from 2, and can also import more assets from 1, and even further, you can also use Classic as your base, so like, many many options), while Chris Sawyer didn't particularly like their existence, but not enough to go and force Atari to do anything about it.

I like Simutrans more because the cargo and passengers have destinations in mind.

TTD and OpenTTD do not which incentivizes mechanisms to dump everyone at the edge of the map.

Aside from that they're both transport games with bad UIs.

OpenTTD has the `cargodist` option which simulates reality more closely. Passengers enter stations with a destination in mind and will transfer at other stations.

Note that a big difference between cargodist and simutrans is in simutrans the customers have a destination before they come to your station, so opening up new routes will increase your customer base. In cargodist, you get the same amount of passengers, regardless of connected destinations, and they just choose from among connected destinations in your network.

I really want somebody to mod this into OpenTTD because cargodist was a good step and a nice approximation for a time, it's no match to the "destination in mind" pax. I'm reduced to play commercial offerings like Transport Fever 2. But as far as I know, it would be a considerable undertaking.

Elsewhere in the thread chain:

>[OpenTTD has bad UI]

Hmm, really? It's cluttered with windows and options but I think the mechanics of windows popping and quick dismissing works out for this kind of a game really well. It scales across #n of monitors so well. I run mine on a 43" 4K television panel, no scaling, and I get all my screen estate I need. Works out so swimmingly.

so ... ideally you would see how many people would be waiting at the station if there were this or that route through the network?

so the game would simulate economic preferences (which then translate to met and unmet demand)

so for every city (and industry?) there should be a preference table of where to buy from (and where to sell to) - and in case of passengers where to go? (and ideally there should be consistency, so if it's possible to go from A to B directly but also through C then preferences should be direct then indirect flows)

> ideally you would see how many people would be waiting at the station if there were this or that route through the network?

Simutrans has this.

> for every city (and industry?) there should be a preference table of where to buy from (and where to sell to) - and in case of passengers where to go?

Also in the game.

thanks! I never heard of it, despite playing transport games since ... well, since the OG TTD.

> I'm reduced to play commercial offerings like Transport Fever 2.

Literally play Simutrans. Same window UI from the 90s.

Why the simutrans folks decided on a weird hardcoded frame rate (40fps) that looks janky as hell on every single display ever I will never understand. Unplayable. instant motion sickness.

It sounds to me like a product of the ‘90s. CRTs were still common, and they support essentially arbitrary fixed refresh rates. It wouldn’t have been a big deal at the time. It’s like how the original Doom runs at a native 35fps when you don’t use interpolation.

I haven’t played simultrans, but I wonder if it feels less janky on a 120 Hz or 240 Hz monitor, since both of those values are evenly divisible by 40. Compared to playing on a 60 Hz display or other non-multiple of 40 refresh rate monitors.

Actually, it's not 40, it's 25, even worse.

Ever heard of little games called Diablo 1 and 2? People spent billions of hours playing those on displays with framerates faster than 25 for 2 decades.

Came here to say this, was an instant bounce for me.

Atari got a game I like called Awesomenauts and revived it from being shutdown F2P to $20. They paid an old dev to get it playable on a temporary contract. Though it has a few rough qualities I'm glad it's playable again.

Wow small world. Hello from a fellow L1 (2012-2016). I didn't realize Ronimo had gone bankrupt, so I suppose I should be glad I have a chance to boot it up again.

What is the story with OpenGFX then? It sounds like OpenTTD is completely new codebase and OpenGFX (which I also helped with) is completely new graphics. Why does one have to pay for that?

It seems to me one does not have to pay for it.

OpenTTD can be downloaded for free off the website, but if you want it through Steam it’s only available in a $10 bundle.

If you like OpenTTD, you may want to try OpenTTD-JGRPP (JGRennison's Patch Pack). It has a bunch of additional QoL improvements and additional features. It was never distributed on Steam, so nothing has changed there.

https://github.com/JGRennison/OpenTTD-patches

In my opinion this is just another example of our broken copyright system. That copyright should have expired years ago, so no troll company which happens to resurrect Ataris corpse for the tenth time can pull stuff like this.

But the lobbyism is too strong for a reasonable 15 or 20 year copyright limit.

Lots of words, but nowhere does it say: why?. Did Chris Sawyer sue them or something?

Chris Sawyer has not been involved in TTD for quite some time, and any remaining rights he had were bought out officially in 2024.

Chris Sawyer was last involved in the IP when it was rugpulled out from under him in the early 2000s and sent to Frontier Developments, the Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster guys, to bury the IP in an unmarked grave with RCT3; Frontier is also the same guys that screwed Haemimont Games games over, the Tropico and Surviving Mars guys, leading to the studio being bought out and rebooted by Paradox to continue Surviving Mars development.

The IP ownership has been legally retained by Atari SA, aka Infogrames, aka GT Interactive, aka GoodTimes Entertainment, which has a very long history of screwing game developers and stealing their IP out from under them and also misrepresenting IP ownership and licensing.

Now, it is also worth mentioning that Chris Sawyer is anti-open source, so he probably personally approves of trying to steal money from OpenTTD players, even if he isn't personally getting a cut of it.

> Now, it is also worth mentioning that Chris Sawyer is anti-open source, so he probably personally approves of trying to steal money from OpenTTD players, even if he isn't personally getting a cut of it.

It's pretty rude to put something like that on him if he hasn't actually said that.

The closest thing was his representative saying something: https://www.reddit.com/r/rct/comments/x6gh81/til_chris_sawye...

"The project has no blessing or support from Chris Sawyer and our view, it is both unethical and unlawful, involving infringements that may in some territories be criminal as well as a violation of Chris Sawyer's rights and those of his licensees - all of which remain reserved.

RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, distributed by Atari, contains RCT and RCT2 rebuilt for modern operating systems under Chris's own direction.

Sincerely

Guy Herbert Director

Marjacq The Space 235 High Holborn LONDON WC1V 7DN"

But not Chris Sawyer.

OpenTTD with its beyond clunky UI has a special spot in my heart.

There is even an Android version with the same very much not touch friendly (but somewhat customizable) UI.

Atari? I never expected to see that ancient name again. If I remember correctly, I've been playing OpenTTD for more than a decade without the original TTD assets, and I usually build it from source, so this change won’t really affect me. Still, it feels a bit strange (even if it may be somewhat legitimate) to see Atari suddenly asserting rights over it.

The corpse of the company has been puppeteered by various owners for decades now

Wade Rosen resurrected a failing Atari, but from multiple interviews it doesn't feel like he is really OK with emulation, as he often refers to the piracy part of this. I feel this was an action they as project did not have much say in, ... as they also clearly stay away from answering a why

I think this is the correct move and I hope the OpenTTD community gets a cut of the sales and was not just bullied to agree

In order to play OpenTTD you needed the original assets. Now they are bundled

People already having the assets were most likely always technical enough to get the OpenTTD builds

Only casual users would discover OpenTTD on stream to be frustrated by not being able to play it without an additional purchase

Version where don't need original assets to play OpenTTD was released 16 years ago.

So does OpenTTD gets a part of the generated income then? The team has costs too to support the game.

People seems to forget that besides console offshoots, the original Transport Tycoon (Deluxe or not) has not been legally available for what seems to be an eternity, without paying crazy eBay prices.

This is a much better compromise than usual in the gaming industry.

Weirdly the OpenTTD Steam page seems to be missing entirely at the moment: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1536610/

Not weirdly, that's the point of the whole announcement. You can't get OpenTTD on its own from Steam anymore, it comes with TTD now https://store.steampowered.com/app/3766810/Transport_Tycoon_...

No, you misread. It's bundled on that page, which links to here:

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/70574/Transport_Tycoon...

But the OpenTTD item listed in the bundle is non-existent at the moment.

Doesn't matter because you can't buy on its own. It's like a free DLC.

https://steamdb.info/bundle/70574/#subs

https://steamdb.info/app/1536610/

It does matter, because the store page isn't just for buying - it's also for seeing system requirements, reading any applicable EULAs before purchase, and reading reviews. You can't do those from any other page on Steam.

Since the bundle is a separate purchase option and not replacing the option to buy TTD on its own, it also allows people to easily find out what they're in for by providing a description of what OpenTTD is, as opposed to just buying TTD on its own.

I get it, but it makes me sad.

At least I already have it in my library so, looks like I still get updates.

No one should pay for this. The players own the game now not some IP rights vulture.

Surprisingly, this is an interesting outcome. Atari could have been worse (better too).

i mean its cool that they made the original playable but having to get an ancient game alongside the one you actually wanna play is stupid

Honestly fair and understandable. OpenTTD builds on TTD (it's right there in the name.)

You aren't forced to play OpenTTD and you aren't forced to get it on Steam/GoG.

It's acceptable.

OpenTTD now has a totally free asset pack covering everything, it doesn't need the original TTD at all.

"builds on" in concept and by using the same three letters. Not builds on in a legal sense

It’s tricky. It started out by disassembling the commercial binaries. There may not be any original code left, but it’s certainly not a clean room project.

Just use gog

    What about other platforms and stores?

    The same change has been made on the GOG.com store. All other distribution platforms are unchanged, and you can continue to download OpenTTD from our web site. However if you enjoy playing OpenTTD but you were never able to purchase a copy of the original Transport Tycoon game, you now have the opportunity to do so!

Just get direct from OpenTTD or your OS

This seems quite positive to me: Clearly the rightsholders are not being total jerks since they're happy to allow an OpenTTD bundle, and the original game is available with modern fixes as well.

I kind of doubt that. Chris Sawyer is on record being really hostile to open source reimaginations, especially OpenTTD (and it's just a reimagination at this point as OpenTTD shares no assets or code with it's predecessor). It wouldn't remotely surprise me if Atari was putting legal pressure on the OpenTTD devs.

I think really hostile is overstating it. He's clearly not a fan, but he seems content to (mostly privately) disapprove rather than take actions against it, which is what would to me qualify him as hostile.

He doesn't own the rights, so there's little he could do even if he wanted.

He did reacquire the rights in 2010 in order to release his mobile port, and only sold them back to Atari in 2024 (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/atari-acquires-transport-tycoo...) for them to do this re-release. So that's 14 years where he owned the rights and was aware of OpenTTD and left it alone.

I don't think they'd have any case for legitimate legal pressure but clearly some kind of underhanded bullying. Hopefully no one buys this

>Chris Sawyer is on record being really hostile to open source reimaginations

No he's not. This is internet gossip.

Given the “rightsholders” have no rights over OpenTTD (only the assets are copyrightable, and OpenTTD has had its own set of open-source assets for the past 15 years), I can’t agree with this.

I’m not sure how to interpret this other than Atari not wanting to compete with OpenTTD on Steam.

It's more complicated than that. For an asset to be derived work from an original, it is not necessary for it to contain anything from the original. If you start from copyrighted assets, and meticulously replace them all with your own art piece by piece, while following the style and constraints of the originals, and while looking at the originals, I'd bet that a court would find your work to be derived from the originals and therefore under their copyright.

A lot of the fan-driven reimplementations of classic games are trivially derived works, because people seem to think that the copyright only covers the pixels in the originals and if you replace them you're fine.

FreeDoom does that with Doom and it has compatible assets but not in the same style altough they are done in such smart way that most PWADs and TC are totally playable without clashes, from Requiem to Back To Saturn.

On game engines, reimplementations are not derivations at all but tools for interoperability, totally legal to create. From Wine to most of the stuff of https://osgameclones.com, to GNUStep against NeXT/OpenStep API (and Cocoa from early OSX) and so on.

If you could sell Cedega back in the day you can totally sell OpenTTD with free assets, period.

The entire PC industry exists today because of cheap IBM BIOS clones from Taiwan.

Yes, the engines are fine. And if the assets are free, then it is fine to sell the engine with them.

What I'm contending is if the assets are actually free. And just because they were all created by volunteers and contain no data from the originals doesn't mean that they are actually free. The rules around derived works are complicated, and too close homages have been found to be derived works, even if there is no actual copying.

If this were to go into court, things that would matter would include both "how visually similar do they look" (the answer is "very"), and "was the artist aware of and did they refer to the originals while doing their work", (given it was done by volunteers who are enthusiasts of the original game, the answers are almost certainly "yes" and "they can't prove they didn't").

And on those facts, the new art is a derived work of the original and falls under its copyright.

Ahem, no. Not the case there. The artwork under OpenTTD fails under fair reimplementation for cohesiveness with the current extensions and modules. Ditto with FreeDoom with Doom: is not inspired but art-compatible so your Strain, Requiem, Back to Saturn and so on PWADs run the same without texture or styling clashes.

Artistically speaking FreeDoom it's closer to Half Life and the like than Doom but here's the catch: playing Strain for instance won't look like a mess, but different, a bit like a demaked Half Life (or a game from its era with the Unreal engine) but not a copy.

> The artwork under OpenTTD fails under fair reimplementation for cohesiveness with the current extensions and modules.

I sincerely doubt that. Unlike the FreeDoom assets, it is too visually similar to the originals, and visual cohesiveness with existing materials (which were created to fit the style of the originals) is a point in favor of it being a derived work, not against.

> The entire PC industry exists today because of cheap IBM BIOS clones from Taiwan.

Forgot to reply to this part: And the reason those clones exist is because multiple companies reimplemented the BIOS in a clean way, where they had one team produce a clean spec of all the interfaces, and then sequestered a different team, who could attest in court that they had never worked with, seen or in other way come in contact with materials related to the IBM PC, to produce a replacement BIOS based on only the given spec. The clone makers that didn't go to all this effort were sued out of existence.

Do you believe that the free assets produced for games generally meet this standard?

I can’t tell if this is narrowly worded to only talk about copyright because you don’t know it was built from decompiled TTD, that source code is copyrightable, and TTD is a trademark. or, you do know, but feel the current IP rights regime is illegitimate. And I don’t want to insult you by quietly assuming the first, so figured I’d spell it out.

I’m usually sentimentally open to IP rights being overly constrictive in the current regime, but faced with a company that owns TTD™ saying “hey, instead of going full lawyer nastygram to avoid confusion, let’s work this out so people get your stuff when they download ours”…seems pretty nice. Like I can’t imagine Microsoft allowing alt-universe OpenWindows™ on the Windows Store.

I think the registered trademark is Transport Tycoon not TTD. The public may have called it TTD, but I'm not sure they used it in trade (IANAL, not legal advice). And I don't think the OpenTTD devs call it "Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe" anywhere. So the trademark case against the OpenTTD devs is likely pretty weak.

I personally think it is the copyright that is the most uncertain. Firstly, there are probably quite a few venues around the world where Atari might be able to take this up, and quite a diversity of precedent between them. Historically Atari litigated in the US - in 1981 they lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_v._Amusement_World on a case someone infringed by copying their look and feel without copying any assets. Other precedents in that jurisdiction have found it's not infringing if similarities are inherent to the subject matter of the game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_East_USA,_Inc._v._Epyx,_I.... but similarity of art style is copyrightable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int....

More likely they were jerks and blackmailed openttd into bundle on the threat of forcing them off steam altogether.

Yep. There is no being nice in the business of copyright. But to be fair, they’ve owned the original base game assets.

Not to mention it’s a reverse engineered version of the base game.

> There is no being nice in the business of copyright.

Sure there is. The concept of "copyleft" is literally about using copyright to be nice.

They legally own the assets. Taking them off Steam if the title is no longer abandoned by the publisher is a 100% reasonable decision, so you need to understand this is above and beyond what the publisher needs to do.

An outcome like this more than likely means the folks working on the rerelease are fans of OpenTTD and worked internally to protect it.

Are you sure the stream version has proprietary assets? I was under impression that they had some open assets, but I may be wrong.

OpenTTD has had entirely their own assets for 15 years.

But OpenTTD itself isn't a clean-room implementation of the game, it's a branch off a decompilation of the original game.

If Atari was really out to copyright the project into oblivion, they're likely to succeed in a legal sense*.

Within the confines of the current laws and known history of the game, and being a fan of both works, I think this compromise is fair.

*NotALawyerClause

The issue isn't the game assets. The division between assets and code is something id invented so they could open up their old game engines while still being able to sell[0] copies of the original DOOM. But that boundary is entirely a choice of the developer, and a consequence of separability of copyright - if you make something, you can break up the rights and hand them out in different ways. Legally speaking, the only thing that matters is if any part of OpenTTD is the same as any part of Transport Tycoon.

This part gets a little confusing in software, because we have a proud history of both cultural norms and actual caselaw allowing unauthorized reimplementation of other people's copyright-bearing APIs. Applying copyright to software basically created a mutant form of patent law that lasts forever, so the courts had to spend decades paring it back by defining boundaries between the two. Reimplementation precedent is part of that boundary.

But all of that precedent relies upon software compatibility - the argument being that if you lawfully use someone else's software library to write software, you are not surrendering ownership over your own program to your library vendor, and someone else with a compatible replacement is not infringing the original library.

Legal arguments relying on reimplementation work well when the APIs in question are minimally creative and there is a large amount of third-party software that used them. The closest example would be something like Ruffle, which reimplements a Flash Player runtime that was used for a countless number of games. OpenTTD exists to reimplement precisely one game, specifically to enable a bunch of unauthorized derivative works that would be facially illegal if they had been applied directly to the TTD source code. This wouldn't fly in court.

In court, OpenTTD would be judged based on substantial similarity between its code and Transport Tycoon's code. While copyright does not apply to game rules, and cloning a game is legal[1], I am not aware of any effort in OpenTTD to ensure their implementation of those rules is creatively distinct from Transport Tycoon's. In fact, OpenTTD was forked from a disassembly of the latter, which is highly likely[2] to produce substantial similarity.

tl;dr I'm genuinely surprised Atari didn't sue them off Steam!

[0] Translation for pedants: "have a monopoly on selling". In the creative biz, two people generally don't make money selling the same thing.

[1] Trade dress and trademark lawsuits notwithstanding - The Tetris Company has done an awful lot of litigation on that front.

[2] The standard way to avoid this is clean-room reverse engineering. It's not a legal requirement, of course, but it helps a lot.

It might be challenging to show "substantial similarity" between assembly and C++ codebase after 20 years of evolution.

Unfortunately thanks to cases like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int...> there doesn't have to be any direct code overlap for a game to be in violation.

> If you already own OpenTTD on Steam, nothing changes. You’ll continue to receive game updates as usual. If you ever need to re-download the game, the game will remain in your Steam library.

This part of the announcement was nice, too. It would suck if existing users had it deleted from their libraries.

Steam is really good about that kind of thing. Not quite the same, but I have a couple of games on my account that haven't been sold on the store for years, and I can still download them any time. I don't think there's any way for publishers to really remove a game that's already been purchased.

You're correct. It's part of the Steam Publisher Agreement that basically, you can't remove your game from users who have paid for it.

And if you push an update that deletes the files, Valve can, will, and has rolled back the update.

Of course, there's also situations where Valve has assisted in removing titles at developers request, but it was a situation Valve was involved in - Specifically, a game called "The Ship" had a Multiplayer version, and it was built on Source, but they could never quite get it to work correctly, even with Valve's help. Wouldn't sync.

Valve helped them remove the Multiplayer version. (but you still kept the single player.)

Steam deleted my perfectly working Arma3 2.x for Linux with no option to return it back, so I stopped to use Steam.

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