Copyright?

[SeansterPro]

are the game textures copyrighted for the source engine. say for example if i were to make a game for commercial use would i get sued or some law suit?

[Peter Brev]

Without a signed agreement between you and Valve i.e. going through Steam Direct, selling a Source engine game would be a copyright violation.

[Wazanator]

Yes you are using their content without their permission in a product, it's part of the EULA.

[Payne☣]

Actually its not part the Source SDK licence that your allowed to distribute Half life 2 textures. The Source SDK licence is only for the source code. Says you may distribute the game code in Source or Object form and only for free. People have to buy/install Half life 2 to get the .exe engine file and textures/models etc to play your game.

[Peter Brev]

Originally posted by Payne☣:

People have to buy/install Half life 2 to get the .exe engine file and textures/models etc to play your game.

No, not with the SDK Base 2013 and even less if the game becomes standalone.

[Payne☣]

I wonder if that Source sdk 2013 could have a legal loophole allowing 3rd party games to mount it and use valves textures. Because if you tell customers "Install source sdk 2013" to play my game becuase if the other game doesn't have its file formats protected by patents then as the creator of the game your not doing anything illegal, the customer is installing and giving access to the assets to another game by their own volition. You're only just providing means in your game engine to read the content. Perhaps this could apply to any game installed to someones machine with Steam or without steam. You could mount textures and models from.

Sorry if I opened a can of worms with this one. But if I didn't figure out someone else would have eventually.

[Peter Brev]

Originally posted by Payne☣:

I wonder if that Source sdk 2013 could have a legal loophole allowing 3rd party games to mount it and use valves textures.

SSDK 2013 is free to use. Do you mean 3rd party games as in games you have to pay for? The license agreement from the SSDK 2013 properly underlines that you can use the SDK so long as you distribute your mod/game for free.

[Payne☣]

I mean like if someone creates a paid game on their own engine using assets from another game, say GTA 5 , or source sdk 2013 but doesn't include those assets and tells the customers of their game to install that game then thier game will work. So basically that paid game is using content from another game without actually breaking the law. There not actually distributing their content.

The only thing that could prevent that I think is if the file format is protected by patent, then they could get them on reverse engineering thier file format to load their assets into their game. Does it make sense? I have no idea. It sounds very grey area.

[Peter Brev]

Gotcha. Sort of what Gmod is doing when people ask you to have content from HL2 + Episodes to run their addon, with the only difference is that Gmod has a full Source engine license.

For other paid games whose companies don't have an agreement with Valve, it's considered leeching and Valve can still act upon that, but I could ask a good friend of mine who is a lawyer IRL and see if he can confirm any of this, but I'm already pretty sure of the answer.