It having official in the title has nothing to do with whether it’s a Valve game or a mod, though. It just means that it’s a trailer released by the developer themselves and not some random person, that’s all that official means.
The developer of Portal is Valve, so saying ‘official’ makes it seem like it’s from Valve.
Yes, ‘Official’ in itself does not mean ‘made by Valve’. The meaning is contextual. In the case of games, ‘official’ denotes it was released by the creator of the title itself. So, in this case Portal was made by Valve. Anything using ‘Portal’ and ‘official’ together means Valve.
They probably could’ve just made a more honest title like “Portal: Revolution - Official Trailer for the fan mod”. The title is longer and more unwieldy, but at least it’d be very clear
Imagine it under a different context.
I made a fan art of some Pokemon that was popular then made a poster of it and started selling it as an “Official Poster” of that fan art. I was the artist of the art on the poster and made the poster itself. However the term “official” strictly means it is properly licensed under the Pokemon brand and that The Pokemon Company themselves cleared the product to be used under the brand of Pokemon. Otherwise they can straight up sue me and take the profits, and they would be legally in the right because ‘official’ is a term that has protection under trademark law.
The meaning is contextual.
Exactly: and it says “official trailer” — separated from the rest by a fancy hyphen just like what I have used. The context is quite clear that it’s the trailer that’s official, and thus the meaning is quite clear as well.
The context is the ‘Portal’ game series by Valve. Interesting how you conveniently skip right over that part.
The developer has now changed the video and removed the word ‘official’ from the title. The video also includes the text ‘Portal: Revolution is an unofficial, fan-made modification for Portal 2 and is not with or endorsed by Valve Software.’ If there was no issues with saying ‘official’ then why did they remove it and add that text there?