OpenTTD on Steam cost money since March 2026

[prissi]

Apparently, Atari bought the rights from Chris Sawyer for Transport Tycoon Deluxe and forced OpenTTD to become a downloadable content for the latter, costing $9.99.

Seems like Simutrans is the only free transport game on Steam now.

[martin509]

Yes indeed, though OpenTTD is still available as a free download outside of Steam.

[victor_18993]

Seriously? I thought that since OpenTTD was based on Transport Tycoon, which was practically abandonware, they couldn't enforce a patent or copyright. So did OpenTTD become paid?

It's a shame, because the work done by the OpenTTD community doesn't belong to Atari, but to the OpenTTD community that has kept it alive. I don't like this kind of news; I hope OpenTTD can somehow separate from Atari.

[martin509]

The main way I see OpenTTD separating from Atari would be if they developed a resource pack that replaces every single asset from Transport Tycoon Deluxe with a generic equivalent, like how Freedoom did the same for Doom. However I'm not aware of any plans in the OpenTTD community for doing this.

[prissi]

The main way I see OpenTTD separating from Atari would be if they developed a resource pack that replaces every single asset from Transport Tycoon Deluxe with a generic equivalent, like how Freedoom did the same for Doom. However I'm not aware of any plans in the OpenTTD community for doing this.

They did, but still have the TTD in their name which IS copyrighted. Also, OpenTTD started from a assembler to C translation of the original code (of which very little remained). This is probably the point where nobody wants to did.

Seriously? I thought that since OpenTTD was based on Transport Tycoon, which was practically abandonware, they couldn't enforce a patent or copyright. So did OpenTTD become paid?

No, it is only on steam and GOG.com, where Atari (who bought the license from Chris Sawyer for pennies) released the old version with a few fixes, barely running on Linux. It is GPL, so the source and downloads from OpenTTD website remain free. Fully covered by GPL (but would not by the artistic license yeah!).

[makie]

Is this good or bad for us?

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

I'm not sure it's particularly anything for us.