I get your point, my point is the infringement would be less egregious without trademark and thus easier for Valve to turn a blind eye to, or even potentially officially endorse via some potential deal à la Black Mesa.
But hey, I am fully willing to concede that I am just a layman with enormous distance from this topic and no specific expertise or insider knowledge, so the possibility of me being wrong is high
Yes, but it’s easier to give permission to use concepts that don’t infringe on trademark than it is to give permission on something that could be argued in court as muddying a trademark.
I know they require permission either way, but what permission they’re actually asking for changes based on what terminology they use
Imo, Trademark. Black Mesa is a concept from Half-Life, but “Black Mesa” to the best of my knowledge wasn’t a registered trademark. “Team Fortress/Team Fortress 2” are registered trademarks however, and that significantly changes the value and functionality of the specific terms.
Unfortunately it’s not just well within their rights, it’s their legal obligation. The stupid situation that is America means that for them to be able to maintain their claim of ownership on the IP trademark, they have to both actively use the trademark and actively police unauthorized use of the trademark by others. If they don’t, they risk losing the right to claim the trademark, which wouldn’t just mean independents running servers for the game, but also would mean unscrupulous entities could produce and sell merchandise featuring the trademark en masse without having to seek permission from or pay any commissions to Valve.
It’s shitty, but it’s more shitty because of the stupid system we’ve built than because of any intentional malevolence on Valve’s part, imo.
Important caveat: I am not a legal professional and it is entirely possible my understanding of trademark law is flawed, but this is my earnest understanding of the situation.
And that matters for certain games, a lot. But it doesn’t functionally matter at all for others. Same as the transition to polygons. My point, which I thought I stated clearly, was not “FPS BAD!!”, it was “FPS generally good, but stop acting like it’s the single most important factor in modern gaming.”
When I was a kid, I felt pretty confident no video game would ever top Dragon Quest 4 (known as Dragon Warrior 4 to me, at the time).
It has been since surpassed, but I do still think it’s pretty damn excellent.
Other big games for me were Ultima Online, later World of Warcraft.
Prior to those MMOs though, I was a big MUD (multi-user dungeon) player. I used to connect to Arythia.org via zMUD or old telnet and spend hours at a time playing and chatting with people in the entirely text-based proto-MMO