Valve released Team Fortress 2's source code
After years of neglect, Valve gives the community everything it needs to build mods and games in perpetuity.
I loved playing Team Fortress 2 when I was younger. Every few years I’d boot it up again and fall in love for another 6 months. There was always something new: bow-and-arrow hunting, W+M1 pyros, challenging PVE modes that gave rewards, tons of new maps, hide-and-seek community servers, etc. And don’t forget about the hats!
Eventually I drifted away from it. And it’s clear that Valve did too. The pace of updates slowed to a crawl. And now the game is swarming with bot accounts that instantly headshot players that leave spawn, killing the player and preventing them from playing1. This problem has existed for years and Valve has refused to do anything about it. And despite all of this, Team Fortress 2 has a large and loyal fanbase, and I tip my hat to them. Other games like CS2 and Dota still get regular content updates2, but Team Fortress 2 is clearly in maintenance mode, and their fans are still sticking around.
I’d like to be clear: I don’t think Valve has any responsibility to update the game. Team Fortress 2 is almost 20 years old3. Most companies do not release fresh content for games that are more than a few years old, and they certainly don’t continually reinvent games that are 10+ years old.
Despite all of this, Valve just open-sourced the entire source code for Team Fortress 2.
Mod makers, rejoice! We've just released a massive update to the Source SDK, adding all the Team Fortress 2 client and server game code. This update will allow content creators to build completely new games based on TF2. We're also doing a big update to all our multiplayer back-catalogue Source engine titles (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM, CS:S, and HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable HUD/UI, prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!
Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible.
This is huge for modmakers. To quote one from Hacker News:
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.
Even better, this removes any ambiguity about building mods on top of Team Fortress 2. You can! They are allowed! You can even build an entire game, just as long as they are noncommercial! From the blog post:
The SDK is licensed to users on a non-commercial basis, meaning that any mod created using the SDK must be free, and any content in those mods must be free. TF2 mods may be published on the Steam Store, and after publication will appear as new games in the Steam game list.
People also spent a lot of time building up their Team Fortress 2 inventories. All of the characters’ weapons weren’t available for free; you needed to get random drops and trade for the ones you wanted. They also gave plenty of cosmetics that were not tradeable. You could also open crates for special items, like weapons that would track the number of kills you achieved with the item. Valve recognizes that these inventories are a point of pride and they’ve asked the mods to try to respect the players’ inventories.
Players have a lot of investment in their TF2 inventories, and Steam Workshop contributors have created of a lot of that content. The majority of items in the game now are thanks to the hard work of the TF2 community. To respect that, we're asking TF2 mod makers continue to respect that connection, and to not make mods that have the purpose of trying to profit off Workshop contributors' efforts. We're hoping that many mods will continue to allow players access their TF2 inventory, if this makes sense for the mod.
It often takes Valve a very long time, but they generally come around to the right thing. Team Fortress 2 still has a large and loyal community. Open-sourcing the code is a great way to give the community a chance to build mods and games that keep Team Fortress 2 alive. It’s also a great way to level up existing programmers. Hell, I’ve been wondering how they coded their achievement code for 15 years, and I’m going to roll up my sleeves and find out how they did it.
I like to think that there’s some guy that only plays Sniper on 2Fort and still hasn’t noticed.
Even if people complain about them nonstop.
It came with The Orange Box, which was unexpectedly the most important single day of video game history that I personally experienced. If it ONLY had Half-Life 2: Episode 2, it would have been worth the price to me. But it additionally was bundled with Portal (my favorite game of all time) and Team Fortress 2. Insane!