We all know the story, so many passion projects are taken down by companies and most commonly not even for reasons that make much sense.
Most recently I saw, portal 64 taken down by valve, you have to own portal, made for a dead old console.
Thats just one of many examples, which leads me to the actual question, why be under the very common threat of an uncaring ruthless company like this instead of creating something new? Or a company that doesn’t openly kick people in their butt? ( Nintendo being so prone that valve didnt even wanna bother)
People like a creative work and are creative. Do the math. Just like every cyber security person started with hacking, every creative starts with derivative works.
Portal 64 was taken down by Valve only because it used Nintendos N64 SDK which was not publicly released. Valve is cool with fanworks for the most part, even allowing them to be sold for profit (Black Mesa). Nintendo (as with most Japanese game companies) are the worst offenders of the extreme opposite.
Yeah, don’t try to remake an active, money-making game like TF2 with plans for releasing it…
As a corollary to what you mentioned, if you want to get a job in the games industry, the number one thing you can do is make a game. A straight remake is great for engineers or artists, and a remake with specific improvements is great for designers. And you don’t have to do anything from scratch, unless you are looking for a core engine type job. Using a game engine like Unreal and publicly available assets and libraries is fine. You also don’t ever have to release or announce your project. The important thing is that you will very quickly learn about the challenges of making a game. If you can start answering questions in an interview and talk about where you encountered challenges, how you researched solving them, etc., you will be that much closer to landing a job.