OpenTTD asks people to please stop being mad at Atari for forcing the game off Steam: 'OpenTTD as a project retains its full independence,' and you can still get it for free

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https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/openttd-asks-people-to-please-stop-being-mad-at-atari-for-forcing-the-game-off-steam-openttd-as-a-project-retains-its-full-independence-and-you-can-still-get-it-for-free/

OpenTTD developer Owen Rudge says “Atari have worked collaboratively with us,” and it also put up some cash to help cover the game’s server costs.

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Corporate Greed ruins everything.

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36

Capitalism. Capitalism is corporate greed. It’s institutionalized greed.

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OP

I don’t think it’s capitalism per se.

A lot of the concepts that underpin capitalism (in the more definitional sense) have existed for thousands of years.

That being said, American style “Big C”, Capitalism reminds me of the Soviet Union (I am from Eastern Europe); not in the specifics, but existential propaganda styling.

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It’s capitalism.

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Capitalism is stages.

In its larval form it is small business capitalism which is easy to justify because it produces a lot of innovation and ideas and distributes money somewhat effectively.

This is the stage of capitalism that would be acceptable if there was a policy way to control it. I am not sure there is though and it has never been done before.

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Stop being mad? Atari abandoned it, someone stepped in and freed something like it for the masses, now they kicked a legally distinct game off steam and want to appease us by paying funding a cheap AF server to let them host on so they can sleep at night charging $9 a head?

I’m afraid they earned their bad press willingly.

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Atari abandoned it,

Atari bought the IP in ’24 and decided to start flipping tables.

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well double fuck them then

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Steam removed it from library despite saying it wouldn’t be. I filed and ticket and it was back mysteriously

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Does Atari have any legal leg to stand on? My only guess as to why they’d have any legal right to force OpenTTD off of Steam is that OpenTTD still uses original Transport Tycoon graphics and/or text, or at least a derivative work thereof. It doesn’t seem like OpenTTD copied any of Transport Tycoon’s code, so it must be other stuff like graphics or text.

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The legal system “works” like this: if you have enough lawyers that sends enough mail with fancy letter head, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

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I’m also confused about this.

in this case Atari is allowing OpenTTD to continue to be offered for free, just not on Steam or GOG

Am I missing something? Just checked on the website, and OpenTTD doesn’t include original TTD’s assets — they can be added separately by the user. So OpenTTD should be impervious to any claims of copyright infringement, and in fact it had to be from the start, otherwise it couldn’t be licensed under GPL or any other open-source license

P.S. Although, come to think of it, I never delved into the legality of reverse engineering, and apparently the US law is not too permissive: the EULA overrides the default assumption that it’s okay, and many programs’ licenses have stock language forbidding reverse engineering. Idk about TTD specifically.

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Yeah, it’s possible OpenTTD is only scared of Atari on the basis that OpenTTD doesn’t have the resources to fight even a completely spurious case.

Edit: Someone in another thread suggested it might be that the OpenTTD folks are in breach of EULA provisions prohibiting reverse engineering and that might be what legal justification Atari would have if they did bring this to court.

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I don’t get why this is even a problem. Why would you install this game through steam? Just go to https://www.openttd.org/ and download it.

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From the OpenTTD website:

An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD

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Additionally, as part of the discussions we held, Atari agreed to make a contribution towards the running costs of our server infrastructure. We are also extremely grateful for the many donations that have come in over the past few days from users - your support will help keep our services going, and it is deeply appreciated.

Ahhh, okay, there it is.

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OP

I also honestly don’t see it as that big of a deal if OpenTTD is available for free.

The one thing that comes to mind is the removal of the earlier (community) Steam version of OpenTTD.

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Simutrans is still on steam.

I’m not trying to convert anyone over to it because it plays very differently than OTTD. It’s mostly that I’m heavily involved in the Simutrans community and it’s nice when any of these types of games make the news. Even for bad news like this I guess.

Hopefully they figure out how to resolve the situation and get everything set back up because it would just be dumb if they didn’t. OTTD it’s such a classic game and it deserves to have more players. Same with Simutrans.

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Today I found out Atari still exists. It poped directly on my hate list, unfortunately.

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