Dang, this is such a cool project and it's a shame this is happening to it. It's understandable that Valve wants to be nowhere near Nintendo's proprietary libraries though. I hope this isn't the end of the project full stop.
I don't know if valve told him to stop the project or just advised him to stop. There are replacement libraries available if he really wanted to continue, or he could make the project require you to have a copy of the library to build
this is clearly not true, Portal literally just got a huge fangame with a Steam release. the issue is entirely that it uses Nintendo stuff and the guy even says as much
This is just a corporate passing of the buck. There’s no reason to believe a third party infringing upon the properties of two parties would give the latter parties any ability or risk of going after one another.
This project was not on steam and as such was not distributed by nor associated with Valve in any way beyond infringement of IP and use of their assets. Let's not give Valve a pass just because they can lazily and baselessly say "um nintendo!" about it.
Does it matter? Legal housekeeping is something corporations do all the time. In this case, they might want less friction with Nintendo. Mayhaps they also want to go full into protecting emulation, but can't do that if any ROMs are specifically part and parcel of a game.
It probably needs to be generic, like bro: you can't prevent the user from reading those files using an application, because those files could have been gained using legal methods. But it becomes harder to defend it in court if there are games in the Valve Steam store that specially target certain IP's directly.
So forget Mario and Metroid Prime mods, you'll have to get those working through an emulator that supports modding or add-ons.
In any case, Nintendo is reselling pirated ROM's because they lost their copy, so yeah. They can't ever be directly against ROMs, as long as they have been obtained legally ***
TF2 source 2 totally makes sense as although TF2 gets no updates, it's still a popular game and valve can't totally take the idea of upgrading it to source 2 off the table themselves.
This one is a shame that I don't really understand, I wonder if it's related to the fact that it's for the GameCube and that's Nintendo's territory. I'm curious to see if this activity continues and expands, as even on steam there are remakes of half life in source and basically fan expansions to portal being sold for profit, among other products and projects.