ZeniMax shutdown Doom Remake 4

jeez it even uses those old 3d intermission screens I made ages ago. They weren't that pretty back then and they look horrific now.

If this is billed as a standalone release (i.e. not a mod of Doom, given it ships with it's own IWADs) then I can slightly understand why Bethesda aren't happy with it being called "Doom Remake". It's essentially it's own game, and being free doesn't really matter: free or not, you can't name your release after an existing IP and expect no-one to care.

Ironically if it was shipped as a mod and wasn't standalone, I can see them objecting less, as they didn't care about Brutal Doom using the name Doom (and we know they're playing close attention to that).

3 hours ago, Nevander said:

Good mod, bad mod... who cares. I'm getting tired of all the corporate bullying going on. Let us make mods in peace dammit. If they care enough to take stuff like this down they need to be making their own official remake.

Please read the rest of the thread before posting, I already posted exactly why it was taken down, and by absolutely no metric could it be considered "corporate bullying". 

(side note: yet this is one of those rare times when i want to say: "oh, zenimax, thank you for putting the end to this abomination!")

3 hours ago, ketmar said:

'cmon, people. the mod is abolutely tastless mess of various assets and ugly fx thrown together, but this is not the point of the post, i believe. the point is that once your doom-related work being highlighted in some media, you're in danger of zenimax anger. even if you'll be able to win a court case, it will be freakin' expensive. i think that this is damned wrong, and this is what @xyzz wanted to highlight.

The case here is crystal clear, though. You cannot market stuff with other people's trademarks or copyrighted assets.

Doom is a registered trademark so you cannot name your game "Doom something" without first getting authorization. And you most certainly cannot combine that with using copyrighted assets and logos from the franchise the registered trademark belongs to. 

As long as you make a mod intended to run with the original game it is unlikely that you will get a complaint, but don't dare to do a standalone release that uses the Doom trademark, that's a guaranteed way to get shut down.

27 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

As long as you make a mod intended to run with the original game it is unlikely that you will get a complaint

yeah, my bad -- i was sure that it was distributed as a mod, not as a standalone release. i still think that zenimax should just ignore it, but now i see a reason in their actions, and cannot say that zenimax lawyers were batshit crazy in this case. quite the opposite: it looks like they ignored it for as long as they could, and took actions only after the thing became highlighted in media.

12 hours ago, Edward850 said:

 

Remember kids, make your own stuff, don't just take 20 other mods and mapsets and call it your own work. 

 It really wasn't a remake of Doom 2016 at all, it was 3D models with Bolognese and a whole bunch of other shit thrown together. Not trying to insult Vasyan777, I'm sure he did some of his own work, but really that's pretty much exactly what Doom 4 remake is lol. Maybe cuz he called it "Doom 4 Remake"? There was a similar mod of Doom 2 made in UE4, looked and played like shit, but it also got a C & D if I remember correctly, author said on ModDb page.

To be honest this mod never sparked my interest. You guys have teh same opinion as mine. But what got me "spooked" is Max starting to shut down community-made stuff. 

Spooked because from time to time I still work on this

https://www.moddb.com/mods/codename-doom

Which is still a "remake" of sorts. 

But I guess it's because the mod was becoming too popular. I mean just googling "DOOM" and you will get on the News tab info about the mod. So either they thought the mod is crap and shut it down, or either because it was quite popular and shut it down.

I wasn't really much of a fan of Doom Remake 4 to begin with (Seeing how it was nothing more than a rather-poorly put together compilation of graphical/auditory patches with FreeDoom thrown in to make it standalone, thus distancing itself from being a "Doom remake"), but, for me, this happening begs the question: Will there be any other mods that get the same treatment? If so, which ones will get the C&D-hammer?

I'm not happy it got taken down, but it's fair it did since it uses stolen assets. I doubt Doomworld would get a C&D, but in 2019 who knows. If it did happen, I'm sure there would outrage on the internet.

Doomworld doesn't use a trademark in an appropriate manner and neither do the other Doom related sites. Since you cannot refer to the game "Doom" without naming it "Doom" there's no grounds to issue a C&D. What you cannot do with a trademark or a trademarked logo is to misappropriate it for your own product.

What WOULD be a problem is if Doomworld used the trademarked and copyrighted logo to advertise for itself.

Sometimes it seems that some people have no idea where the line is being drawn, and what actions may prompt a C&D.

21 hours ago, xyzz said:

Spooked because from time to time I still work on this

 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/codename-doom

 

Which is still a "remake" of sorts. 

Do you advertise the mod as a "stand-alone game (you don't need to have Doom at all!) containing all of Doom's levels, sprites, sounds, and more but they've been tweaked a bit algorithmically so they're no longer exactly identical to the originals, and also it's bundled with Freedoom (no Freedoom asset actually seen or head during the game, mind) so it's a technically legal sort of piracy because I changed things? I mean, when you crack the copy protection of a game, you modify it, so it's no longer piracy to distribute it, right?"

If the answer is "yes", then stop doing that. If the answer is "no", then you have nothing to fear.

For anyone who is willing to give the mod a shot and/or concern about the mod's state, the author has reuploaded it here. This is basically a modified GZDoom 4.1.3 build now with the pk3 inside; copyrighted/^TMed stuff removed; and it requires an IWAD to run. 

I checked some pk3s found in the build in SLADE and the credits are very vague; which suspects that the author is stealing contents and assets from other mod creators.

Gallery^TM:

I maybe wrong and a bit bullsh*t though; feel free to correct.

In conclusion, we now know that the author done little to nothing at all for this remake.

i don't think that the author is stealing: it looks like he just dropped in alot of wads, and forgot to put the accompanying .txt files/update credits text. this can happen when you're doing such huge... "collections", putting things together to check if they work, then doing some tuning, and then you simply too tired/too happy to remember about .txt.

let's give the guy some goodwill points, why not? ;-)

@TheNoob_Gamer You say the mod author (for lack of a better term) removed the copyrighted stuff, but I can still see the WADs that contain the hi-res remakes of the DOOM weapons, monsters, textures, etc.  Anyone can still run it with Freedoom, so I don't think that version of the mod will make ZeniMax any happier.

22 minutes ago, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

You say the copyrighted stuff is removed

Well I quoted that from the author of the mod. Beside, I added that just before I submited the reply. 
I think the copyrighted stuff the author is referring to here is stuff related to Zenimax/Bethesda, not about the modders. If you are talking about modders, I provided some screenshots in my previous comment; I even said that "I suspect the author is stealing contents/assets from modders".
But Ketmar (and you, after the edit) has a point so I may rethink about this, lol.

 

I think the main issue is that the models and textures are derivative works of a commercial game's assets, and can be used without owning an official IWAD.

1 hour ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

After rethink about this, well, if the author has a chance to reupload the mod and edit/remove stuff in it, he should have included a .txt file that generally describe the premise of the mod and give credit where it's due.

yeah, sure. but he may don't have the original files anymore, so he cannot give proper credits. not that it makes a good excuse, of course: he could put a bold notice like "sorry, i lost some original files, and cannot give proper credits, so if you're the author of any used matherial, please, contact me."

not that i'm trying to be a devil's advocate, it just happened with me several times (i forgot about proper credits), and this case looks very similar.

or the author may think that "everything that can be downloaded is free, public domain, and has no ownership". this is quite possible too. ;-)

13 minutes ago, ketmar said:

yeah, sure. but he may don't have the original files anymore, so he cannot give proper credits. not that it makes a good excuse, of course: he could put a bold notice like "sorry, i lost some original files, and cannot give proper credits, so if you're the author of any used matherial, please, contact me."

That's not even remotely a valid reason. If you don't have expressed permission either from the original notes or from the author directly, then you outright do not have permission, period.

20 minutes ago, ketmar said:

yeah, sure. but he may don't have the original files anymore, so he cannot give proper credits. not that it makes a good excuse, of course: he could put a bold notice like "sorry, i lost some original files, and cannot give proper credits, so if you're the author of any used matherial, please, contact me."

 

not that i'm trying to be a devil's advocate, it just happened with me several times (i forgot about proper credits), and this case looks very similar.

 

or the author may think that "everything that can be downloaded is free, public domain, and has no ownership". this is quite possible too. ;-)

Lol, fuck that. If you don't have the original readme / credits.txt then tough titties, go find them and ask. Forgetting isn't an excuse either. Yeah, the stuffs all posted online for free but like, don't be a dick and repackage or use other people's shit without crediting them.

2 hours ago, ketmar said:

i don't think that the author is stealing: it looks like he just dropped in alot of wads, and forgot to put the accompanying .txt files/update credits text. this can happen when you're doing such huge... "collections", putting things together to check if they work, then doing some tuning, and then you simply too tired/too happy to remember about .txt.

Now now, let's not breed any false hope about a simple case of forgotten credits on the author's part. He is Russian after all.

So I downloaded the 1.19 Experimental file from the new ModDB page, it's 907MB in size so it's still a big download. The ModDB download page does state some of the resources that are included (though nothing specific), and it has some sort of credits. However, there is no credits file of any kind in the package, not even a copy and paste of the one from the download page. Since none of the original text files that may have been included with these resources are in this download, the issue of using other people's work is still here.

Looking inside the res folder, I decided to look inside the smooth_slad_txt.wad file. For some bizarre reason, it has another WAD file of the same name, no idea why this isn't inside the doom_remake_4.pk3 file. All that WAD file includes are smoother animations for the SLAD textures (and without any text file from the source obviously). After some brief confusion, I launch Plutonia with GZDoom and it was a long 30 second wait. I got greeted with an insane number of script errors as so many lump files are being loaded, lovely.

The title screen has a text url for New Doom, even though that site is long gone by now. I take it as that the author isn't even trying to hide the lack of thought to this random compilation. It takes 10 seconds to load each map and seeing Plutonia MAP02 just made me stopped. There might not be any music files in this version, but nothing else has changed.

Gallery:

1 hour ago, xvertigox said:

 

Lol, fuck that. If you don't have the original readme / credits.txt then tough titties, go find them and ask. Forgetting isn't an excuse either. Yeah, the stuffs all posted online for free but like, don't be a dick and repackage or use other people's shit without crediting them.

That guy would get a big F in school for not crediting the sources in his essay. This dumpster fire of a mod needs to just, die.

3 hours ago, MFG38 said:

Now now, let's not breed any false hope about a simple case of forgotten credits on the author's part. He is Russian after all.

Mod DB in this regard sucks, there are a lot of mods with stolen assets. And the problem is not nationality. I reported for mods with stolen content on Mod DB more than five times and it was not russians uploaders.

Your comment reeks of strongly pronounced racism.

ModDB doesn't care if some random person reports assets belonging to someone else. They'll most likely only react if they got a legally binding request from the owners of the stolen assets. Sadly most hosters on the internet take a very questionable stance here - this, btw, is the main reason why the EU changed its laws recently - because these sites were always able to weasel themselves out of responsibility by 'not knowing'.

26 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

ModDB doesn't care if some random person reports assets belonging to someone else.

Last time it took a few email attempts over the course of many weeks to have them take down re-hosted content.

ok its no longer standalone (not mine) https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-remake-4/downloads/doom-remake-4

Just removed some off topic posts about russians and their alleged propensity for software piracy. Drop it please.

6 hours ago, Alter said:

That guy would get a big F in school for not crediting the sources in his essay. This dumpster fire of a mod needs to just, die.

Very unlikely when many people are starting to like this mod and praise it as "the premiere way to play Doom on modern days".