Who knows, though I always thought that it was rather odd that OpenTTD was on Steam. I'm not sure whether that's because it is an open source remake or because you had to own the original for the graphics/sound assets back in the day. (Apparently that changed over 15 years ago!)

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.

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Krutonium 5 hours ago | parent [-]

As someone who has been involved in OpenRCT2, which is another Chris Sawyer/Atari game, from what I can tell, Atari has a very hands off approach to these things.

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.

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tart-lemonade 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	II2II an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. At least they want to "lazily cash in". A lot of gamers like to talk about preserving history, yet are critical the moment businesses preserve that history doing it the way businesses naturally do things (i.e. by selling a product). Besides, we do not know what went on behind the scenes here. It could be anything from the open source developers voluntarily pulling their game from the store, to the publisher requesting they pull their game from the store, to the publisher threatening legal action. Heck, the publisher may have even paid the developers of OpenTTD to bundle their engine with TTD. While some scenarios are more likely than others, we are too quick to attribute actions and motivations based upon non-existent information.

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999900000999 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think most people who still buy RTC only do so to get the assets for OpenRTC2.

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

	▲	anthk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can just legally get the ones from the demo file in ZIP format.

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matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> As far as we can tell, it's basically a "don't cause us problems and we won't bother you" situation.

Seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Respect for Atari.

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squeaky-clean 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I remember reading an interview some years ago where they basically said they wouldn't try to shut them down, but they also did not appreciate the projects existing.