ZeniMax shutdown Doom Remake 4

On samedi 15 juin 2019 at 5:03 PM, Ferk said:

When did id make this rule? Could you reference it?

In 1993 or 1994, I guess? It's in the LICENCE.DOC file that was distributed with Doom. The whole thing about

Quote

2. Permitted New Creations. Subject to the terms and provisions of this Agreement and so long as you fully comply at all times with this Agreement, ID grants to you the non-exclusive and limited right to create for the Software (except any Software code) your own modifications (the "New Creations") which shall operate only with the Software (but not any demo, test or other version of the Software). ID reserves all rights not granted in this Agreement, including, without limitation, all rights to ID's trademarks. You may include within the New Creations certain textures and other images (the "ID Images") from the Software. You shall not create any New Creations which infringe against any third party right or which are libelous, defamatory, obscene, false, misleading, or otherwise illegal or unlawful. You agree that the New Creations will not be shipped, transferred or exported into any country in violation of the U.S. Export Administration Act (or any other law governing such matters) by you or anyone at your direction and that you will not utilize and will not authorize anyone to utilize, in any other manner, the New Creations in violation of any applicable law. The New Creations shall not be downloaded or otherwise exported or re-exported into (or to a national or resident of) any country to which the U.S. has embargoed goods or to anyone or into any country who/which are prohibited, by applicable law, from receiving such property. You shall not rent, sell, lease, lend, offer on a pay-per-play basis or otherwise commercially exploit or commercially distribute the New Creations. You are only permitted to distribute, without any cost or charge, the New Creations to other end-users so long as such distribution is not infringing against any third party right and is not otherwise illegal or unlawful. As noted below, in the event you commit any breach of this Agreement, your license and this Agreement shall automatically terminate, without notice. You hereby agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless ID and Activision and ID's and Activision's respective officers, employees, directors, agents, licensees (excluding you), sub-licensees (excluding you), successors and assigns from and against all losses, lawsuits, damages, causes of action and claims relating to and/or arising from the New Creations or the distribution or other use of the New Creations or relating to and/or arising from your breach of this Agreement. Your obligations set forth in the immediately preceding sentence shall survive the cancellation or termination of this Agreement.

Emphasis mine. This has always been interpreted as meaning it's okay to include edited Doom art in a Doom mod, or edited Doom II art in a Doom II mod, and so on.

It was actually an important point during KDiZD's development, as it includes recreation of certain Doom II elements (super shotgun, chaingunner zombie, Hell knight, etc.), but done with original art instead of using the Doom II sprites, and the KDiZD team did contact id for advice on what would be okay beforehand.

I suppose it's a little late to mention but I came across a website for Doom Remake 4, which not only resembles the ZDoom website poorly, but the front page describes the "mod" as if it were some official remake being made for modern systems. Below the front page mentions something called "GZDoom Enhanced", of which there's a copyright symbol near it. When going to the download page, the text below called the GZDoom included in the experimental file "GZDoom Enhanced." As far as I can tell, there is no difference with the GZDoom "Enhanced" 4.1.3 build and the official GZDoom 4.1.3 build, aside of a different icon and removing "Resource Settings" from the launch menu.

A bit of searching later and what I got is that GZDoom "Enhanced" is apparently some version of this asset compilation done by someone else(?) before it was named Doom Remake 4 or something. I can't be sure but if this site indicates anything, GZDoom included in the experimental files are absolutely positively not official builds and the "mod" was pretty much asking to be taken down anyways.

Edit: Site now redirected to some forum, looks like it was taken down.

As has been pointed out multiple times, they took exception to the "remake" in the title which is simply misleading and may be considered damaging.

All the other projects being named use the term "Doom", but to so because they require the game named "Doom" to work in the first place.

It's often a fine line they have to tread here, but once a project may give the false impression of something "official", it will most likely result in legal action.

That said, if a project named itself "GZDoom Enhanced", I could easily get a C&D for it as well because it constitutes false advertising that may damage the GZDoom "brand". Of course I do not have the resources to have it shut down, but people really need to be more careful with how they name their projects!

This mod was never banned or shut down by Zenimax. The author got called out by the doom community for stealing a ton of assets from other mods without permission and then tried to save face by forging a C&D letter out of, you guessed it Stolen Assets!