Enlarge / "5ario" here won't be on the Garry's Mod Steam Workshop for long. (credit: Steam / LmaoSPW )

The popular long-running Source-engine physics sandbox Garry's Mod has begun to take down Nintendo-related items from the game's Steam Workshop page, following an apparent takedown request from Nintendo.

In a Steam Community news post , mod creator Garry Newman writes that some items have already been taken down as part of an "ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through." Indeed, combing through the over 1.8 million Garry's Mod Steam Workshop add-ons to find all of Nintendo's copyrighted content is sure to be a significant task. A simple search for Pokemon Thursday morning turns up nearly 3,000 seemingly copyright-infringing results on its own.

"If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo-related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot," Newman jokes in the announcement post.

Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. (credit: Epic Games )

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has long been an outspoken opponent of what he sees as Valve's unreasonable platform fees for listing games on Steam, which start at 30 percent of the total sale price. Now, though, new emails from before the launch of the competing Epic Games Store in 2018 show just how angry Sweeney was with the "assholes" at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing "the little guy" with what he saw as inflated fees.

The emails, which came out this week as part of Wolfire's price-fixing case against Valve (as noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter ), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are "no longer justifiable." They also offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fury Sweeney and Epic would unleash against Apple in court proceedings starting years later .

“I bet Valve made more profit... than the developer themselves...”

The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents, from August 2017 , starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is "anything we [are] doing to annoy you?" That query was likely prompted by Sweeney's public tweets at the time questioning "why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB." Later in the same thread , he laments that "the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here's Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc."

Enlarge / Valve took a look inside Portal 64 , saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut down the experiment. (credit: Valve/James Lambert)

Any great effort to generate appreciation for Nintendo's classic platforms, done outside Nintendo's blessing, has a markedly high chance of incurring Nintendo's wrath. This seems to apply even when Nintendo has not actually moved to block something, but merely seems like it might.

That's why, one week after announcing that his years-long "demake" of Valve's classic Portal to the Nintendo 64 platform had its "First Slice" ready for players, James Lambert has taken down Portal 64 . There's no DMCA takedown letter or even a cease-and-desist from Nintendo. There is, as Lambert told PC Gamer , "communication with Valve" that "because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, [Valve] have asked me to take the project down."

Ars contacted Valve and Nintendo for comment and will update the post with any new information. Lambert could not be reached for comment.

Enlarge / Yes, that is SteamOS. No, that is not a Steam Deck. (credit: Ayaneo )

Since the successful launch of the Steam Deck nearly two years ago , we've seen plenty of would-be competitors that have tried to mimic the Deck's portable form factor and ability to run PC games. Thus far, though, these competitors have all been missing one of the Steam Deck's best features: integration with the increasingly robust , Linux-based SteamOS 3 .

That's finally set to change with the just-announced Ayaneo Next Lite , the first non-Valve portable hardware set to come with SteamOS pre-installed. We can only hope this is the start of a trend, as Valve's gaming-focused operating system brings many advantages over gaming portables (and maybe desktops) that run a full Windows installation.

A bespoke, portable gaming OS

Ayaneo's announcement highlights a few vague-ish features of the Next Lite, including a 7-inch 800p screen, a 47 Wh battery, and drift-resistant hall-effect joysticks. But even though the announcement doesn't include a specific asking price, Ayaneo promises that the device "integrates outstanding cost-effectiveness" and will be "the all-new cost-effective choice with flagship experiences."

Enlarge / Remember, this is the N64 platform running a game released at least five years after the console's general life cycle ended. (credit: Valve/James Lambert)

James Lambert has spent years making something with no practical reason to exist: a version of Portal that runs on the Nintendo 64. And not some 2D version, either, but the real, blue-and-orange-oval, see-yourself-sideways Portal experience . And now he has a "First Slice" of Portal 64 ready for anyone who wants to try it. It's out of beta, and it's free.

A "First Slice" means that 13 of the original game's test chambers are finished. Lamber intends to get to all of the original's 19 chambers. PC Gamer, where we first saw this project , suggests that Lambert might also try to get the additional 14 levels in the Xbox Live-only Portal: Still Alive .

So why is Lambert doing this—and for free? Lambert enlists an AI-trained version of Cave Johnson's voice to answer that question at the start of his announcement video. "This is Aperture Science," it says, "where we don't ask why. We ask: why the heck not?"