PC Gaming

Making Portal for the N64 will give you much more exposure and media attention than making just another indie game statistically likely to fail and never get any attention. The guy made a name for himself with this project. Now when he creates an original game, it will get a lot more attention for being made by the Portal 64 developer and have a much better chance to succeed.

Indie devs need to stop wasting their time and efforts on fan projects that will never be played by the public

It's not your time, let them use it how they want. Probably the fun for most is in the development.

Here's the thing, though. Just coding a game is a lot, before worrying about actually designing mechanics and managing meta-progression and writing even a basic story and world building, etc.

Making a fan project is real, concrete experience. It allows you to focus on one specific thing (actually writing the code and managing the codebase) without focusing on all those details. There's a reason most programming courses involve making simplistic clones of stuff that already exists. Many game development classes/tutorials do exactly the same, and work you through a clone of some other, pretty simple game.

That's what a fan project like this is, but it lets you focus on how a game larger in scope manages all the same problems instead of how to do it in brick breaker or whatever. It's valuable experience that's hard to replicate on a smaller project, and it's how some people learn best.

Others absolutely will do better starting small and just iteratively building up forever, but it's not the only way to learn. This approach is legitimate and for many people, better.

Now advertising it? Not a huge point of that. Unless you're actually asking people for feedback (how did they solve this problem?) and learning from example that way, you don't gain anything from telling people about it.

You realize in this case the guy was using proprietary libraries from the N64 without Nintendo's consent in this mod? Valve would be absolutely insane not to dmca that mod. This guy kicked a hornets nest of lawyers by releasing this stuff even if his intentions were to just show the businesses what he can do. He knew what he was doing, he knew what would eventually happen, which is absolutely why he's telling people not to be mad at valve. Valve are just protecting their business in the same way Nintendo is protecting their intellectual property.

I’ll never forgive those Microsoftian bastards for shutting Halo Online down the very next day after it was released.

It's not greed, companies will literally lose their trademarks if they don't defend them

Why not just make a version of the game that is stripped of IP, then "someone" anonymously releases a conversation mod that adds in the copyrighted content?

But it makes even more sense to just do your own copycat version and actually sell it and make money off it.

Your whole point is undercut by the existence of Portal: Revolution, Portal: Mel, City of Heroes, etc. There's a way to do fan creations that's supported by the IP holders and ways not to do it.

I don't expect indie devs to be experts at the law but they can hardly be surprised if they go outside the boundaries set by the IP holders and then get a C&D.

Yup. Remember the Dolphin release? Oh wait