Nothing about OpenTTD has changed. You can literally just go download it off their website for free - same as it was 20 years ago. And you can add it to your Steam library just fine. It's only been on the Steam store for 5 of those years.
But the open internet is dead now and just being "de-merchandised" from a platform feels like being relegated to the dark web (maybe something the open source community doesn't quite fully appreciate).
That's cumbersome. The main benefit of platforms is comfort. Steam takes care of installation and updating, while often also offers some access with the community. Open internet has more choice and liberty, but for the price of more work and annoyance.
That the main reason why all big platforms succeed and the small platforms fail. Comfort is just too valuable.
Steam succeeded because of its store, which still has the best prices on the market. That’s their original moat. Their current moat is sunk costs. People have thousands of dollars in their Steam Library. At this point Steam’s advantages as software are negligible, especially considering its poor performance.
Then how come epic games store is not able to get a foothold for years despite offering literally free games? Not even children which are most likely to use it because of Fortnite use it for anything but that. Steam is objectively the better store and game launcher regardless or price or "sunk cost".
Nothing cumbersome about it. No one who wants to do this is going to fail at it, or even be inconvenienced.
> That the main reason why all big platforms succeed and the small platforms fail. Comfort is just too valuable.
The value of the platform, in this case, is that people know where it is, but they don't know where openTTD is.
Since there was an internet to speak of, there always were and still are vast amounts of people unaware of stuff that exists, limited by no "platforms" but only by their own lack of desire.
Of course there will be some ways like social media or something else. But that question is what seems to worry many people in our case, in my humble opinion. Remember that most of the planet's population is not even aware of existence of open-source projects and open-source concept itself. So how are they supposed to discover it if they don't know about it? When it's present on platforms like Steam and GOG, it helps to spread the word, but when it's not... Well, I guess that seems to be a problem for some people.
Presumably, through social interaction with others in the communities they are a part of. That's how I heard about OpenTTD in the early 00s, at least.
You're asking a leading question. The verb you're using here is one specifically indicating interaction with a "platform" (a digital aggregation of information). The answer is you don't search anything, you completely change your epistemic and interaction model. Instead you build a social web of people who have their own social webs, and you share things you've made and things that have been shared with you. This is your "platform".
How are most games on steam found? I kinda doubt all people find them through steam own mechanisms. I even doubt the majority find them this way. Gaming has multiple sources of information, be it news, social media, influencers or cooperations. Video-content is probably the biggest source of being discovered for most games these days.
This question tickles me. In the before time, something would be so good you were compelled to tell someone about it.
Sriracha, Costco are brands you likely know that dont advertise, and somehow got popular. In the 90's there were bands that were massively popular with little to no air play, and less promotion (Fugazi is a great example).
This was a Costco ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i5CQVfmx-0
My introduction to their Sriracha was in 1994, when the Puerto Rican cook at the Italian restaurant I worked at sent me to Stop and Shop for the "rooster".
Till hosing their relationship with Underwood Ranch (their sole provider of chili's) this was the only product in the marketplace (much like ketchup was always Heinz for a time). Absolute market dominance wrecked over not honoring your handshake deal with your ONLY supplier.
The latest batches by them are green, and no one wants them. The underwood version of the product is taking over --- it has a giant dragon on the bottle now, and what I look for now rather than the rooster.
It's not like you can discover it on Steam any easier.
Of course, searching for information itself is also a skill, but it is a truly essential one for the modern world.
I’ve had half the mind to just try my own hand at game dev again.
Or Google's low ranking of their content
Relying on third-party ranking of whatever is a clear indicator of lack of effort.
Forums, search engines, social media, and link aggregators are all third parties with their own ranking. Nobody outside of a handful of small-web hobbyists have put a "cool links" section into a website since 1997.
The answer to your question is: same as we always did before! Do you talk to friends? Colleagues? Family? You definitely chat with us here on HN. All of these people share things with you constantly.
There's a funny obsession in tech circles to gather all the information they can as quick as possible. I much prefer to optimize for the quality of information I'm ingesting.
So, in your opinion, we can cut out the reliance on third parties by relying on third parties?
When I started using the internet, if I asked someone what the internet was I was unlikely to get any answer at all. It was new. I had to define it for myself. Ask a 6 year old what the internet is. It’s YouTube. TikTok. Roblox. Experiences that are designed to keep them there. It is obviously more difficult for an individual to engage with the open web than it ever has been (for those with access at all).
Ignorance isn't the point. The issue is that it's your responsibility to stop them. the buck always stops at "I". Are they just going to stop themselves? Is your neighbor going to stop them for you? If so, why should she if you don't?
As Kant said, enlightenment is getting out of your self inflicted tutelage. When is it self inflicted? When you have the reason but lack the courage to act without direction from someone else.
Yes, there's influencers and lobbies but the solutions are still one search away. Even Google doesn't hide the alternatives from you. And sure we can force feed every American veggies and force install linux on their computers but that'd defeat the point.
who isn't aware? If we were in the 80s and you lived in a village without an internet connection, sure but today everyone is aware of the means to liberate their computing environment or whatever else is bugging them. That's not an excuse any more for virtually anyone. The average American spends, not metaphorically 'literally', actually literally five hours per day on their smartphone. If you can doom scroll for five hours you can learn how to use linux, or get on a treadmill to lose some pounds.
the reality is people have the option to choose between comfort and autonomy and they voluntarily choose the former and call people annoying who preach about internet freedom and privacy. Which they might very well be but it also makes it clear they know and don't care.
Wait if it is your responsibility to stop corporations from doing bad things, why are they still doing them?
I didn’t realize there was an individual to talk to about this but, while I’ve got your attention, frankly for the sake of mankind you need to do better at this. They are running wild out here
It’s very easy. If you’re a producer, you maintain a separate presence outside the walled platforms. If you’re a consumer, you look outside the walled platform for content.
I want to try one day. Steam's pricing parity adds friction to that, though. I can't reward people for venturing to a place where they own their software, and that seems to be the only real way to move many.
Perhaps some comment on a forum or usenet somwhere. Or perhaps on a compuserve group. Or maybe someone else at school.
head-shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKgyH9k1CSM
You can still download it for free outside of Steam.
If I make a Sonic fan game and Sega is like, you can keep it online, but just not on Steam, that’s nice.
In this situation you still have the option of playing it on Steam for a modest price
The alternative is the Nintendo route…
If megacorps would stop being stuck up their own ass and completely irrational about how they exercise their IP rights, they would actually be able to benefit massively from allowing their fan communities to flourish. The status quo doesn't have to be this shitty, and we don't necessarily need to give credit to companies who meet the incredibly low bar of "not Nintendo".
Atari is very kind to say you can keep distributing a fan game, just not on a commercial storefront.
I don’t expect to see Sonic Fan games on Steam anytime soon. Even though Sega is one of the best publishers in this regard.
Now if OpenTDD said no , we’re leaving it on Steam for free ,Atari could probably contact Valve to get it delisted.
A compromise is not a loss. I’ve downloaded tons of applications and games without Steam holding my hand and somehow I’m ok. Although I do wish sandboxing solutions with better gpu support existed
It isn't kind hearted. Them trying to shut down openttd would lead to a gigantic clusterfuck that would hurt their sales. This is them trying to remove a direct competitor to them releasing a new game as much as possible, without generating community backlash - to maximise profits
These companies are not our friends
It may have been "screwed over" if there was no access to the oss game. But you can still download the game from their website. They just do not want that these appear as competitors in steam/gog platforms, so they bundled the oss version. Both sides thought this was a reasonable resolution. Thus I don't see "screwing over" here.
This is, at worst, a morally-neutral compromise that's far better than any worst-case scenario
But let's suppose I am Atari and I have for some reason proceeded with buying said abandonware without doing my research. Upon discovering OpenTTD, I would hire the guy behind OpenTTD to work on a commercial version, keeping OpenTTD free to play but perhaps with some cool monetized expansion pack that would not have been possible without giving the developer the funding they need to work on it. That way I am making an investment in actually adding value to the game, and rewarding the person who kept it alive and in turn earning community goodwill, instead of investing in a shortsighted attempt to collect rent that backfires massively.
> commercial version
> monetized expansion
It is not clear to me whether turning (future evolutions of) OpenTTD commercial and monetising it is a preferable scenario for its community.
I'd note it also doesn't need to be done in a way that deprives players of any free future evolution. Paradox has a nice model for their games where they release expansion packs, where about half the content is part of a free update to the base game and half the content is paid. That would be perfectly suited for a case like this.
I then go "well why re-release this ancient game running in an emulator, when this exists?" and ask the core team of OpenTTD if they want to monetize their steam/GOG releases now that I can licence out the TTD IP to them and remove any remaining legal ambiguity (and recoup my """investment""" via revenue sharing).
And if they don't I take it as a learning experience (to do my homework before I buy IPs) and release my TTD-in-an-emulator on steam and GOG knowing full well that its probably not going to generate many sales. Maybe I add "hey just so you know there's this really cool modern source port you can get for free..." to the description and hope that I can generate some sales off of good boy points.
This argument is like "you buy a McDonald's then realize there is a burger king across the road. What do you do?" Yes one is a clone of the other. But you don't get to just bulldoze the burger king.
That's pretty cool of them.
It's absurd that some company can buy up and profit from thirty-year-old formerly-abandonware, and that society have been collectively browbeaten into believing in the notion of “““intellectual property””” at all.
No, they don't. They own the game data, and the original game engine. They don't own the reimplemented Open Source game engine.
OpenTTD did not have to do anything here. It sounds like they had a very positive interaction with Atari, in which Atari is providing them with some support and collaboration, and in exchange for that, OpenTTD agreed to formalize the requirement for "you need to own the original game data" by having people on game stores purchase the original game through them before getting OpenTTD through them.
That seems like a pretty reasonable approach. It should be held up as a good model for collaboration. But it shouldn't be treated as "they have every right to [demand a] cease and desist".
So it'd be pretty much impossible to claim the engine came about as a clean room implementation. And of course, even if maybe they could win a court case (honestly don't think they could) the mere threat of one would likely make openttd quit.
I don't have the impression that OpenTTD encouraged or sanctioned obtaining those assets illegitimately. They talked about how to extract them from the original game that you owned.
To what extent did they copy "appearance" other than supporting the use of the original assets?
It is certainly possible that they didn't scrupulously maintain clean hands, but I wouldn't automatically assume that.
Back when OpenTTD first released, it was a decompile (?) of TTD that loaded the assets of the game itself. This was... legally dubious, since reverse engineering.
But over time they Ship of Theseus'd the game - all code rewritten from assembly to C/C++ (I don't know), open source asset packs, etc. It's still the same base game, same feel, etc but nothing of the original code or assets remain.
I don't know enough about IP law etc to judge whether Atari would have any leg to stand on in a court of law, but it would be Complicated to say the least.
Or is it just the case that the project maintainers got paid off?
I get that it's not the same Atari as it was 30 years ago. But I liken it to you being a Beatles cover band and the estate of John Lennon reaches out to you, you're going to treat them with some sort of respect.
(Of course, in an ideal world, companies would not be wholly inattentive to older properties — but that's basically unsolvable without economic-level solutions for the problems of capitalism, so I don't have any ideas specific to video games to offer.)
While OpenTTD is open source, it's basis is really that the original game was reverse-engineered, originally using the original assets, and then rebuilt.
Also all the map data etc is owned by Atari, so you need to have a 'genuine' copy to access all the levels etc.
Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts (even if you call it an OpenBirk)
- Chip's Challange and custom levels pack
- Freedoom+Blasmepher for Doom/Heretic
- LibreQuake
- Supertux2
- Oolite
- Kgoldminner/XScavenger with level sets
- Frozen Bubble
- Any X11/console/9front sokoban clone. Everyone reuses the same level set over and over.
There are clear counter examples - see Tengen vs Nintendo, Nintendo vs Palworld, Microsoft vs halo inspired games, Microsoft vs Minecraft clones. Most are settled out court. Examples that go to court tend to be from companies with budgets to fight, lots of projects will just get DMCA’d and won’t fight, or will back down after a legal letter.
Ultimately copyright and IP infringement is decided in the courts, and the rules aren’t entirely black and white.
Out of the two claims, the only one that made it to appeals court was about whether it was fair use for Bleem to use screenshots of PS1 games to advertise its emulator (which was compatible with those games). The Ninth Circuit decided it was. But that's not relevant here.
The other claim was more relevant, as it was an unfair competition claim that apparently had something to do with Bleem's reimplementation of the PS1 BIOS. But the district court's record of the case doesn't seem to be available online, and the information I was able to find online was vague, so I don't know what exactly the facts or legal arguments were on that claim. Without an appeal it also doesn't set precedent.
If there were a lawsuit over OpenTTD, it would probably be for copyright infringement rather than unfair competition, and it would probably focus more on fair use and copyrightability. For fair use, it matters how much something is functional versus creative. The PS1 BIOS is relatively functional, but a game design and implementation are highly creative. On the other hand, despite being creative, game mechanics by themselves are not copyrightable. So it might come down to the extent to which OpenTTD's code was based on the reverse-engineered original code, as opposed to being a truly from-scratch reimplementation of the same mechanics. Visual appearance would also be relevant. Oracle v. Google would be an important precedent.
Another similar case with exact grounds was GNU which with Linux it completed an OS albeit in a hacky way, because the original OS would have been GNU+Hurd, but both are reimplementing Unix. Same SH derived shell, but extended. Kinda like OpenTTD. We have GNU Coreutils, Findutils, GNU AWK reimplementing and extending AWK (even when AWK was propietary), GNU Zip, Tar... the list goes on and on.
Oh, another one: Lesstif vs Motif. Same UI, if not very, very close to Motif 1.2 in order to be interoperable. Today it doesn't matter because nearly a decade a go Motif was relicensed into the GPL, but tons of libre software depending on propietary Motif was just seamlessly running with LessTIF libraries except for some rough edges/bugs. One of the most known example was DDD, a GUI for GDB.
1. OpenTTD is not a clean room rewrite. It started by disassembling the original game and manually converting to C++ on a piecemeal basis.
2. As the game was updated, sure lots of this code has been rewritten. Almost certainly the majority. But has all of it been legally rewritten? Ehh... much less clear.
This sort of process has generally been held to produce a derived work of whatever you're cloning, even if the final result no longer contains original code, hence why clean room reverse engineering even became a thing in the first place.
It's probably fuzzy enough at this stage that you could have a long expensive drawn out legal battle about it (and I suspect we'll see at least one for some other project in the coming years with the recent trend of "I had AI rewrite this GPL project to my MIT licensed clone"). Would OpenTTD win? Who knows. Could OpenTTD afford it? Certainly not.
I'm not sure if look and feel of a game like Transport Tycoon can be copyrighted, but I wouldn't like to be against it.
(I remember buying Transport Tycoon from I think Beatles, in Altrincham. I clearly remember riding on the front seat of the bus upstairs on my way to Flixton back in 1994 reading the manual)
You can see the same effect if someone were to make a yellow short guy with metal claws and regeneration as a character.
You can retype someone’s book with your keyboard, it’s still not yours.
Maybe you all realize how much brainwashed from corporations yall actually are.
https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/assets/articlePDFs/v03/03HarvJL...
All of them totally legal reimplementing either prior look and feel and functionality.
I'm no expect, but Chris Sawyer style games certainly provided a unique overall impression to me. Whether it needs to be a registered design or not I couldn't say, but it's not going to be cheap to find out.
More recent battles have relied on Trademark and Patent law rather than Copyright, but "Look and Feel" is still a legal grey area
What seemed majority at the time was the idea of some collaboration/partnership and monetary exchange.
I think its a good lesson in communication, especially when you have a dedicated community. Transparency is welcome.
Regarding Atari and "their rights", there hasn't been an Atari for way too long and the IP was passed between companies left and right without additive value to users. I expect transport tycoon to be another cash grab, but happy to be surprised for the better.
Or the OpenTTD guys were not the best communicators. Considering it's the OpenTTD creators live at the intersection of the groups 'programmers' and 'adults who like to play with train sets' it wouldn't be a stretch.
All in all I think this collaborative approach is very much the preferred outcome.
All those people saying 'the open web is dead' and 'people don't download from websites anymore' are exaggerating imo.
Chris Sawyer as creator for example is known to have particular opinions on this as I recall, and if you e.g. look over to film making there's also a hot debate over preserving original artistic intent and original creations over later remasters. OpenTTD is more than a maintenance upgrade, it's a continuation and a different game.
Honestly I think it's probably just OK what Atari has done here. Monetizing the original assets is well in their rights both legally and morally (especially considering e.g. royalities to Chris), OpenTTD remains available everywhere, they're monetarily supporting OpenTTS, gamers will find it.
Note that once a commercial company decides to ship a FOSS project, they also are much more invested in potentially controlling its direction to different ends. This setup keeps OpenTTD community-run and independent, free to make decisions independent of a commercial agenda. This also feels worth protecting.
When you get to the last, you can definitely see how the original creator/artists could disagree.
That sound indistinguishable from being pressured.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise to me.
Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381746 - March 2026 (131 comments)
What kind of question is 'Others?' is doesn't even make any sense. It just pisses me off.
I think I'd pay for a Windows License if it means I get official support for Windows apps on Linux (provided the support is indeed good).
its not really possible for the rights holder to compete with a free product, since they arent harvesting data or oxploiting the userbase, so they need to charge. and openTTD getting a cut of the money really does show that this is fully collaborative
No, fuck 'em. They had nothing to do with developing the game, and in a sane copyright structure a thirty-year-old work would be public domain by now.
You are not wrong. But alas we don't have that. ANd in the reality we live in this collaboration is way better than the alternative.
Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?
But what I can imagine has very little to do with what actually happens.
OpenTTD started as an effort to translate the original game’s assembly into higher level code.
It was not a clean room implementation. The original code was used as a base.
> Atari approached us to explain their plans for the Transport Tycoon Deluxe re-release, and what it might mean for OpenTTD.
> we understood that a compromise would be needed to balance Atari’s commercial interests […] against the availability of a free, well-developed evolution of the game.
Sounds to me like you were pressured by Atari to make these changes.
This seems to be the simplest compromise, and allows OpenTTD to continue existing without too many problems from Atari, so people don't want to make waves.
Not sure why so many commenters are failing to grasp this.
Some games have a good replayfactor. Transport Tycoon Deluxe was nice in this regard; the spirit should be retained so younger folks can play it.
Society has become quite 'entitled' to 'free' things. As popular as they are, torrents and free streams and emulation and clones of games in an open source lib are all stealing something. I know thats an unpopular thing to say but it a fact.
Now, those rights violations viewed in a larger context may change one's opinion on the whole, and I'm not jumping into that debate today.
Atari did a cool thing. That's rare in the corporate world today. Give praise where it's deserved.
Emulators and game engine clones may encourage "stealing", but they are also unique creations. The people who develop said software are typically careful about keeping their software separate from copyrighted materials. In the case of OpenTTD, they did so by creating their own graphics and sound assets to accompany the game engine.
If you are claiming that creating an independent clone of the game engine is stealing, you are entitled to your own opinion. But do understand that it is an opinion and not a fact.
I would also ask you to consider the consequences if that opinion were codified into law. It would make all forms of progress (e.g. literary and technical) nearly impossible since nearly all ideas are derivative. To give an example: the computing landscape would be very different. IBM compatibles would not have been a thing, leaving the market either fragmented or consolidated in the hands of a single company. Oh sure, there were companies that did steal by producing verbatim copies of the IBM PC ROM or the mainboard layout ... but we are talking about a reimplementation in the case of IBM compatibles and OpenTTD, not copies.
Come to think of it, the entire computer industry would have been set back by decades with an excessively strong IP regime. No one seriously classifies the ABC as the first computer, yet the courts used it to strike down patents on early computers. In the early days, IBM played games with IP licensing to try to restrict their competition, something the courts shot down. AT&T didn't give away Unix, nor did they license patents on transistors out of the goodness of their heart. They did so because regulators and the courts recognized that IP could be used to stifle competition (and, by extension, it would have inhibited progress). So I doubt that the courts would agree on emulation or game engine clones being stealing either.
Update, I got openTTD confused with openRCT, It looks like openttd did redo the graphics and sound, so I think the parent post is correct and atari has little to no legal ground to stand on, the only thing they could reasonably claim is trademark, that is, it is them using the name transport tycoon that is the problem. And that is still not theft, it is trademark infringement.
At this point I would like to plug Simutrans a transport tycoon clone that actually took the effort to make their own graphics and sound. But really, as much as I enjoy simutrans any normal transport tycoon connoisseur will hate it, a bit too different and clunky for them.
https://www.simutrans.com but steam is probably the easiest way to play.
But, at the same time, I find it interesting that "emulations and clones" are considered entitlement (in a derogatory sense), but copyright protection is not. Before 1976 in the US, the _maximum_ copyright term was 56 years, and that would require filing for an extension from the default of _only 28 years_.
I think it's easy to forget that copyright as we know it is not set in stone. Historically, after 28 years, most works became public domain and that meant you could do literally whatever you want with it and it would not be legally stealing at all. I think we as a society have forgotten what it means to have a public domain.
Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp.
> The object code of a program may be copyrighted as expression, 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), but it also contains ideas and performs functions that are not entitled to copyright protection. See 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).
These corporations have actually gone to court over this and lost. It's just that they technically won by bankrupting their opponents via legal costs.
Historically, all works were public domain at all times.
It's not illegal to create a compatible game engine. The functional ideas inside the games are not protected by copyright. So long as games are clean room reverse engineered there should be no problem.
Actually, even if the reverse engineering was not clean room, it might not be a problem.
Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp.
> The object code of a program may be copyrighted as expression, 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), but it also contains ideas and performs functions that are not entitled to copyright protection. See 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).
> Object code cannot, however, be read by humans.
> The unprotected ideas and functions of the code therefore are frequently undiscoverable in the absence of investigation and translation that may require copying the copyrighted material.
> We conclude that, under the facts of this case and our precedent, Connectix's intermediate copying and use of Sony's copyrighted BIOS was a fair use for the purpose of gaining access to the unprotected elements of Sony's software.
I don't think this has been tested in court, but the recent flood of Nintendo game decompilations is likely to change that.
This is an unpopular opinion because it is not, in fact, a fact.
If you're going that far, aren't proprietary games and software "stealing" open source libs too? I think your definition is a bit wonky.
I've gained huge respect for Atari. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the likes of EA, Nintendo, Square Enix.
If it would have been, then there's probably an inconsistency somewhere.
You can make that argument, but you need to actually do so and not just leave it unsaid.
People who merely buy stuff to extract rent from it are, at best, a necessary evil. There's nothing admirable in rentseeking behavior. It's just playing the game.
If we're hanging around a campfire in the paleolithic, the guy who figured out how to make beer is going to be everyone's best friend. The guy who won't let anybody drink from the stream because it's "his" is liable to meet an unfortunate end.
Copyright being as extremely long as it is makes us think that making something once means we should profit from it in perpetuity, but that's not really beneficial for society to work like that. That's exactly why patents don't work like that.
Remember, the purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works. Well, if you can create one work and profit from it effectively (i.e., your entire career), why would you create another work? That's just a waste of effort. That's literally the business model of IP holding companies. They don't create. They just own. They're rent-seeking.