John Carmack did a stellar job in that respect. Doom and Quake are still very much alive thanks to his decision.
> The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft did to windows.
I would assume it's a lot more complicated today. Even the most simple programming projects tend to have a ton of dependencies nowadays.
And it doesn't even account for the fact that you might be killing future projects by handing out the blueprint of old games. Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?
Probably, unless they all had the budget to create a shit ton of new assets and replace the old ones. And the code was released with a license that allowed commercial use.
Isn't that what we're getting from AI generated content?
Note, I'm not saying that a random person will create something better. I'm just saying there might be a risk of saturating the market if you can play 100 versions of the same game for free.
The 100s of clones would be more like fanfic. A set of people would get very into them, search out the good ones (perhaps better than the original), or revel in the terrible ones. But then the whole community still comes together to watch the latest marvel film anyway.
The main effect would be to build and maintain the community for the next commercial version.
Maybe not, but we would have 100 other games that may have expanded the genre further.
You are over appreciating the geek's willingness to toil on assets and make up a compelling storyline :)
Not that Ubisoft games are worth playing, but for a single player game at least it can be much worse.
DOTA as well, started as a mod for Warcraft 3 and eventually spawned a franchise.
Trying to capture ALL the value (in this case the game developer/publisher) is a mistake anyway. The healthiest game franchises have broad ecosystems around them. Releasing the source code of old games just encourages that.
If there is one set of games I wish were released it is Ambrosia Software's catalog. Of all their games the only one I can find that is open source is Maelstrom (It's the Escape Velocity series, I'd love to see opened).
And Chiral!
Man I'd love a Linux port of that game.
Thanks for bringing that up. Those were good times. And agreed. Would love the source to original EV alone. Gonna take a gander at maelstrom! Thank you!
Their game library had some gems but they famously made most of their ga my es by ripping off other games. I’m guessing that didn’t scale.
Their biggest seller was a small Mac utility called Snapz Pro if memory serves.
They, frankly, were never a company run for anything other than milking a quick buck.
That was one hell of a trip down the memory lane.
Also if you haven't played Endless Sky, that's inspired by EV and open source.
Releasing the old doom source code doesn't stop id software from making sequels all the way up to doom eternal.
According to Doom Eternal's wiki, it sold 3 million copies in spite of all these free to play doom games.
In the case of Doom, the engines being released has lead to an active community developing the engine (eg. GZdoom which can now be played in VR, with ray tracing, fancy shading, etc.) on pretty much any hardware with a processor.
Its still alive and kicking today as Falcon BMS.
There are so many things that I learnt from tinkering with the Quake 3 source code in 2007, I am still very happy and grateful that I had the opportunity at the time. My understanding of topics like real-time applications, AI, platform independent code and debugging would be very different if that code would not have been released.