The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games [video]

This won't go anywhere. Today's games rely on a myriad of services just to get to the start screen and they're embedded into cloud infrastructure. The times were there was only a single server that was used to run a game is long gone.

Today's games also rely on a server instance that contains most of the logic and includes tons of proprietary software that is patented by the gaming companies. This includes data collection, player fingerprinting and even on the fly in game data manipulation that makes you miss a shot you should have hit.

With all this proprietary stuff in the server they won't hand out the binaries or even the source. Nor won't they hand out binaries that are stripped of the proprietary stuff because that would make the in game manipulation obvious.

And before anyone starts an argument if this really exists, I'll put one patent with the relevant excerpt at the bottom of this post. THere are many more patents when it comes to data collection, player finger printing and in game manipulation to "level the playing field". Reading through them and understanding what they do is quite interesting.

===== SNIP ====== >8 ==========

FIG. 3B illustrates a table providing an exemplary list of parameters of a gameplay session that are modified based on a player's skill level and the corresponding experience for players of different skill levels. For example, in a first-shooter gaming environment, when a first player aims his weapon at a target, a parameter defining the tolerance for how accurate the player's aim must be to hit the target is modified based on the acquired skill level of the player. The computer assigns the tolerance for how accurate the player's aim must be to hit the target differently based on the skill level of the first player. A player having a higher skill level will be assigned a lower tolerance parameter and therefore, will have to be more accurate in aiming in order to hit the target. A player having a lower skill level be assigned a higher tolerance parameter and, therefore, could be less accurate in aiming in order to hit the target. As shown, column 310 of Table 1 lists modifiable parameters such as ‘degree of accuracy required to hit a target’, column 312 lists the experience of a player having a ‘high’ skill level, which may be ‘high degree of accuracy required’, column 314 lists the experience of a player having a ‘medium’ skill level, which may be ‘medium degree of accuracy required’, and column 316 lists the experience of a player having a ‘low’ skill level, which may be ‘low degree of accuracy required’.

======= 8< ==== SNAP ============

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10561945B2/en