Team Fortress: Source 2, an ambitious fan project that sought to reimagine the venerable Team Fortress 2 with the Source 2 engine, has come to an end. Amper Software, the company behind the project, announced today on Twitter that it was forced to cancel the project after receiving a DMCA takedown notice from Valve.

The rebuild was in its early stages when we first saw it in 2021, but even then it looked promising: a team of over 20 volunteers had shown off numerous character classes in action, including Pyro, Scout, Sniper, Demoman, and Soldier, and a full map of the arena well was completed. Work has continued since then, and from the brief video of June 2023, it appears to be progressing very well.

However, the project ran into trouble when Facepunch announced plans to make significant changes to the s&box (read "sandbox") of Garry's Mod, the spiritual successor to Team Fortress: Source 2 is building upon it! Facepunch stated in its announcement that this overhaul "means that most of the games people have created in the s&box will be unplayable," and indeed that happened with TF:S2.

"These changes are for the better future of s&box as a whole, and we support it. So it comes down to the current state of our project and the motivation of the entire team." The team has decided to hold off on their efforts until the future of s&box is more clear and stable.

"This does not mean that the project is over; we are simply putting it on hold. Anyone on the team or in the community is still free to contribute to the project if they want to, and we will still be around.

Amper Software concluded its message by saying that "it may be time to explore new ideas," which is never a good sign for the future of the current project, but at least the possibility of a comeback remained. Now, however, that possibility seems to be completely gone.

"Today we received a DMCA takedown from Valve for all of our public GitHub repositories and all forks created by the community," Amper tweeted." While we had recently been discussing the future of the project internally, we have already come to the conclusion that with the recent major engine changes to s&box, the current state of the code is no longer usable and we have moved on from the project as a whole, ceasing development of the project.

"Sadly, this means that this DMCA takedown is the nail in the coffin. We can't bring it back and we have struck Valve's attention, it definitely seems that they are not willing to use their IP (which is completely fair and legal from them)."

That settles the matter, but there is some doubt as to whether the removal notice is legitimate: in response to Amper's message, a handful of people, including Gloomwood developer Dillon Rogers, claimed that the Open Xray mod for Stalker had received a DMCA a few days earlier removal request and stated that it turned out to be a fake.

I think it is unlikely that this is the case, and even if it is, there is no guarantee that it will breathe new life into Team Fortress: Source2: The mod team is ready to move on to other things anyway, and this takedown is just a simplification of that decision. It's also possible that Facepunch has yet to reveal how they plan to tackle the s&box overhaul, so anything is possible.We've contacted Valve and inquired about the takedown and will update if we hear back.