I might be wrong, but it feels like Atari are like parasites in this situation feeding off the hard work of OpenTTD devs.
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!)
- 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...
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.
Why do you think it took such little effort? Is it simply utilizing an emulation/portability package like Proton?
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.
Scummvm could adapt OpenTTD for their own working in the exact same way as OpenTTD. They did that with Ultima.
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.
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.
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.
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
Seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Respect for Atari.
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.
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.
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.
There is even an Android version with the same very much not touch friendly (but somewhat customizable) UI.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/70574/Transport_Tycoon...
But the OpenTTD item listed in the bundle is non-existent at the moment.
At least I already have it in my library so, looks like I still get updates.
You aren't forced to play OpenTTD and you aren't forced to get it on Steam/GoG.
It's acceptable.
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!I’m not sure how to interpret this other than Atari not wanting to compete with OpenTTD on Steam.
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.
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.
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 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....
This part of the announcement was nice, too. It would suck if existing users had it deleted from their libraries.
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.)
Not to mention it’s a reverse engineered version of the base game.
An outcome like this more than likely means the folks working on the rerelease are fans of OpenTTD and worked internally to protect it.
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
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.