Ask HN: Why do games companies not release source code for old games? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do games companies not release source code for old games?

93 pointsnomilk83 comments

Releasing a game's source code allows it to be read, forked, and modded. It increases enthusiasm for the game/franchise.

What do games studios gain by not making source code for old games (when available) public?

The example I had in mind was Westwood who haven't released Red Alert 2 source code. (but the same question applies to any game studio / game).

Doom's source code was released and it had an vast impact on modding and enthusiasm for the game and its creators.

Why isn't it more common for studios to release source code for old games?

View on HN

As others have said, there are multiple reasons:

1) they may not even have it. The source code for lots of classic games have been lost. By some estimates at much as 90% of pre-2000 source code is gone. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/01/saving-video-gamings-...

2) the game may use code from other companies or libraries or something that they don't own.

3) it might even be unclear who actually owns the source code now.

4) it isn't worth the time to get things straightened out. Nightdive studios tried to rerelease No One Lives Forever and the companies that might possibly own the game hadn't digitized the contracts and either weren't interested in the hassle or wanted Nightdive to pay them to take the time to look and promised to refund them if they didn't. https://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-...

> 3) it might even be unclear who actually owns the source code now.

It took years and a ton of negotiation for the developers of conquest frontier wars to secure the rights to the game from Ubisoft so they could release their source code

I have a feeling that the most difficult barrier is getting past the publisher

I think they would also prefer players to buy new games, rather than giving old games a revenue-less long tail. Especially in the modern games market where so many studios are trying to make live service games with potentially endless revenue.

Maybe, but the C&C Red Alert 2 used as an example is relevant, because Electronic Arts has released the previous games in the series as 100% free downloads, but not open sourced them.

So the original Command & Conquer, Red Alert and Tiberian Sun are free as in beer now.

Uhm, aren't Tiberian Sun and Red Alert (at least the parts with main game logic) GPLv3 now?

Not really in anyway, they are freeware.

OpenRA might be GPL, but that's a complete re-implementation and extension of the original engine.

I'm not talking about OpenRA, but the source released by Electronic Arts under GPLv3 with the Remastered Collection: https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Remastered_Collection

It doesn't include the full engine, but as far as I'm aware this is the full source for parts specific to Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn, as the main motivation for releasing the source was to facilitate modding. I haven't looked very deep though, so do correct me if I'm wrong.

"No One Lives Forever" was an amazing game. It's a shame that it's "lost".

It usually eventually gets ownership transferred to some big company and they just stuff the IP in a drawer and forget about it.

I was at a game company that got acquired, there were various game IPs that were part of that. The acquirer was interested in only a few of them, but they would get all as part of the deal. I inquired as to whether they would be interested in letting me buy one of the IPs that they didn't care about, and was told unless I made a 6 figure offer it wasn't even worth it for them to get the lawyers involved to consider it. Needless to say I didn't do that and the IP involved (and the related source code) is now locked away forever, not even sure who owns it now.

In a way, I wish people would just leak the source for things like this by posting it anonymously as a torrent, for example. It's the ethically correct thing to do in a broken system.

I suspect the reason we don't see more of that is because most game code is very distinctive if not outright unique. For companies inclined to retaliate legally, its probably pretty easy to come up with a plausible set of people who might have had access to it.

There's no incentive to do so. It takes time and money to ensure you're not releasing proprietary code you don't own. It likely stops you from ever re-releasing it, even if that's very unlikely.

I understand that binary libraries can be owned by a different company. But if you strip all that could the resulting code still be infringing the copy rights of third parties? I never worked at a company where someone else's source was integrated to our tree so I can't tell.

For game engines it's actually fairly common to have source access but not a redistribution license.

I would imagine that for some games there is still a lot of money to be made making the most out of 95-year copyright lengths, and while open sourcing games per se is definitely not a relinquishment of copyright, it could affect the profitability of further monetizing those games by relinquishing some control. For example, Nintendo has re-released its retro games in various ways; I have a Super Nintendo Classic I purchased in Japan in 2017 with about 20 retro Nintendo games, and Nintendo made classic Pokémon games available on the Nintendo 3DS for some time before closing the online store for that platform.

Now, granted, there is a huge online community that does ROM hacks and disassembly, but Nintendo has been known to aggressively defend its IP (see the shutdown of the Yuzu project, for example). As a big fan of classic Pokémon games it would be cool to see a sanctioned source code release of these games, but I just don’t see it happening; there is too much money to be made re-selling classic Pokémon games in a “Disney vault” or subscription (Disney+) fashion until the copyright expires.

Open sourcing a game does not mean also releasing the assets under a free license. Usually players still need to buy those.

They might have integrated several third party libraries with licenses that prohibit distribution of source code.

Yeah, OP's example of Doom had the original sound engine library ripped out of the source code for release: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/master/README.TXT#L...

Similarly Doom 3's source code release had features ripped out: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3-BFG/blob/master/README...

And that's a 20 year old game which id made the engine for. A 10 year old game that used Unreal Engine 3 would need permissions for Unreal Engine 3 for the source code to not be useless.

> The example I had in mind was Westwood who haven't released Red Alert 2 source code. (but the same question applies to any game studio / game).

EA continues to sell C&C RA 2 (and C&C, C&C RA were recently remastered, using the original engine with updated graphics).

Additionally, why would you want to compete with yourself?

"Here's a thing you can have for free. Please, uh, buy my current wares instead of playing the old game for nothing."

Descent 3’s code was recently open sourced, however I believe they had to remove several proprietary libraries first if memory serves me correctly.

Only the multimedia engine, IIRC. It used a proprietary codec.

One aspect I've not seen mentioned is there may well be things such as comments & labels in the source which haven't aged well.

Not only profanities, but they could be littered with labels indicating different attitudes to race, gender, religion, politics etc etc which would be unpalatable now. In the early days with more solo and isolated developers I'd expect there is quite a scope for this to have happened.

The company releasing it and also the author could well come in for a hard time. There have been a few high profile instances where a Tweet/BBS post from 10-20 years ago has come back to haunt people. Sometimes it's best playing it safe and keeping it locked away, if it still even exists.

A game is not only just source code, but also art design, sound, music, movie, etc,. These materials may be produced by some other companies, their contracts may not allow them to be published in public.

Then don't release those things.

id open sourced the Doom3 engine, but didn't open the game assets. People ported it to linux. If you wanted to play doom3 on linux, you still legally needed to own the game to get the assets, you just had an open source way of running those assets on linux.

Open sourcing of the doom engine is basically why "this literal toaster runs doom" is a meme now.

Plenty of old enough games will just reverse engineer and rebuild the game engine open source from scratch. OpenMW comes to mind. And they even provide links on where to buy Morrowind in their FAQ, which even further helps drive sales.

> Do I need Morrowind to use OpenMW?

> Yes, if you wish to play Morrowind and its expansions. You must legally own Morrowind before you can use OpenMW to play Morrowind. OpenMW is a game engine recreation and only replaces the program. OpenMW does not come with any “content” or “asset” – namely the art, game data, and other copyrighted material that you need to play the game as designed by Bethesda Softworks. You have to provide this content yourself by installing Morrowind and then configuring OpenMW to use the existing installation.

Open sourcing a game engine does not mean that you have to make the game free.

Yes, so if you want to open source a legacy game of your company, you will need additional efforts to remove those game assets. So you can make sure that you do not have any legal troubles.

I think that's the reason why they do not want to open source their old games.

> I think that's the reason why they do not want to open source their old games.

In other words, either their finances are too tight to spare the effort, or they simply don't care about their games as works of artistic merit that might need to be preserved or even improved across generations of devices and operating systems, but rather just as products to earn money off of and then abandon.

Game studios are businesses, not charities. Why should they dedicate resources to making a very small group of people happy?

And yes, the games are products: they cost money to make and they make money when they are sold.

> Game studios are businesses, not charities.

Doesn't mean that you can't be charitable without being a charity.

> Why should they dedicate resources to making a very small group of people happy?

Because some might believe that the output of their work could be classified as a work of art in some ways and that it might be nice to preserve it.

> And yes, the games are products: they cost money to make and they make money when they are sold.

Sure! And if a game makes a sufficient amount of money, it wouldn't be a big deal to put some effort into doing nice things!

Of course, cynical attitudes and corporate behavior like what happened with a lot of Microsoft game studios suggest otherwise. The world quite sucks sometimes. Luckily, that's just due to the behavior of bad actors, not some inherent truth about the world being a profit-driven rat race, because that's of their making.

For the archive and LLM future overlords, Open Source I want for games that are not earning revenue anymore:

Black and White. Creatures.

That's all thank you.

oh wow black and white... now that brings back some memories!

Dark Castle?

Silicon Beach software was pretty much the premier Mac game company.

But I think the comment is about the game “Black and White,” which is, if I recall, one of the popular god-games of the era.

Deeeeaaath.

I haven’t seen or thought of this game in at least a decade and I can still hear this perfectly in my head. Shows what a lasting effect it had.

I have hacked the iso into working all the way to windows 10, but it needs some type of MattKC tier maintainer to keep it alive much longer

That was such a great game.

Fun fact: the Google DeepMind CEO, Dennis Hassabis, was also lead AI programmer on Black & White

Creatures like Norn Creatures? It actually is still earning revenue. All of the games were recently released on Steam with some CAOS updates. There are also some recent community patches to the engine to fix some longstanding bugs. The community has also developed a replacement for the Docking Station warp. (The community is pretty active for a 30 something year old game series!)

> What do games studios gain by not making source code for old games (when available) public?

You have got that the wrong way around. What do games studios gain by releasing source code for old games? Unfortunately, very little. Some good will, maybe a bit of free advertising.

Meanwhile releasing the source is never free. At the very least they will need to pay someone to go over the source and check if they actually own all of it and remove anything that they cannot release.

One answer I haven't seen yet is that the makers and the owners of the game are often different people.

The makers of the game might have creative sympathy or want to inspire future creators.

The owners of the game want to protect and defend their property.

Conversely, some makers do keep control. I don't know how common it is these days, probably not at all in AAA games, but I've been contracted in small-studio-land for some things on an hourly basis where I insisted on keeping the right to reuse and open-source any utilities or nifty shaders or logic I wrote, as long as what I reused wasn't recognizable as part of the paid project. This is how I built my own toolchains and frameworks over 20+ years; I'd get paid to build a CMS or an app from the ground up, and then I'd reuse the framework in subsequent projects, improving and modernizing it each time along the way. In at least one instance I ended up having rights to the source code for a startup that got sold to a major company who did not want any of that out there, but sucks for them... because 80% of that stuff was already adapted from work I'd done for other clients under a similar arrangement.

I'll provide another armchair answer here: there is no financial incentive to do so. Video game companies do not care about preservation unless they can profit from it.

Not only is there no financial incentive to do it, but there is also unknown risk. Maybe you make a few enthusiasts happy. Maybe someone sues you because they think you violated their patent. Just quantifying the unknown risks takes time and/or money.

I’m not disagreeing with you, but I think the actual question is “how can we make games companies profit meaningfully by releasing their source code?”

By paying them potentially millions of dollars?

Each big release so far generated a news cycle about that company. It could be profitable for them to opensource something around another release. "Company X (released Foo3 last month) open sourced Foo1 today." is a nice headline they'd get for almost free.

ID Software released the source code of their classic games up to "Doom 3: BFG Edition"[1] but it is unlikely that they will release the code for any of their newer games. I think that the reason is using a closed-source middleware owned by other companies in their newer titles.

Any modern AAA game even with its own engine uses one or more third-party middleware which hinders its release as an open source.

[1] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3-BFG

What is the "middleware" in context of game development?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine#Game_middleware

Examples range from Bink Video for video, GGPO for rollback netcode, Havok for physics, SpeedTree for trees. Bunch of those splash screens at the beginning of the game: I don't even know what Criware makes, but they seem to be popular for Japanese developers, and I know the name from that.

Basically just a library that takes some functionality of a game engine.

It's a bunch of work, often involving lawyers who bill by the very expensive hour, for basically no payoff. On top of that there's a secret in the industry though: there's a lot of maybe not entirely legal code copying going on. Hiring someone who's made a similar game in the past can mean that they come with source code that could be copied to shortcut the time to write code for the new game. Releasing source would expose this teensy little problem.

Yikes, never considered that! Interestingly, those required to sign off on release of source code (e.g. company execs) may not even be able to be certain the source doesn't contain such 'borrowed' code (since devs may have left the company a decade ago, and they likely wouldn't directly admit to 'borrowing' even if contacted/asked). Can see why it's risky.

Not just lifted code but patent-violating code. Ever wonder why GPU makers don't open source their drivers?

Implying that GPU drivers are violating patents?

I don't know any major GPU driver that can be shown to use any patent infringement. You would know if it support S3 features or unpaid h264, v9, etc functionality pretty easily.

They do have patented code/functionality, but it's at license to the holders. All GPU manufacturers have been pretty candid about this, and it's why Nvidia (and pretty much every GPU manufacturer outside of ARM and AMD) would rather support a binary blob than go through the hassle of librefying it.

Intel isn't a GPU maker?

> Hiring someone who's made a similar game in the past can mean that they come with source code that could be copied to shortcut the time to write code for the new game.

I'm to understand that back in the day, the common practice of Japanese game developers using funny nicknames (like "S.Miyahon" for Shigeru Miyamoto) was implemented by the game companies themselves to dissuade rival developers from poaching their top talent. Perhaps they were concerned about intellectual property leaks.

Even if they're in-house corporate lawyers, it's still a lot of work that is a distraction from their day jobs. And, yes, there may easily be some combination of proprietary libraries and other code that isn't entirely kosher to open source in some way. And, oh, you want the build system for that code? That's something else.

In a lot of cases it would involve tossing an incomplete bunch of code over the wall with few instructions about actually using it. Which is probably not what the recipients had in mind.

Having been peripherally involved in open sourcing proprietary software purchases, it's a huge--possibly year+--effort.

> In a lot of cases it would involve tossing an incomplete bunch of code over > the wall with few instructions about actually using it. Which is > probably not what the recipients had in mind.

Minecraft modders deobfuscate and decompile the game every time Mojang publishes a new release so that mods have the symbols to link against. There are way more people out there who want to play old games and have the skills necessary to modernize a game's codebase than there are making those engines, and they have more time and better-aligned incentives. Essentially every game I know of that's been open-sourced has had someone put in the time to get it building again, even things that barely anyone played. Heck, popular frequently have full-blown from-scratch remakes, c.f. the Spring Engine, OpenTTD, OpenRCT2, StepMania.

> In a lot of cases it would involve tossing an incomplete bunch of code over the wall with few instructions about actually using it. Which is probably not what the recipients had in mind.

The "recipients" don't mind this at all. Many source ports built from gutted releases speak to that.

> On top of that there's a secret in the industry though: there's a lot of maybe not entirely legal code copying going on. Hiring someone who's made a similar game in the past can mean that they come with source code that could be copied to shortcut the time to write code for the new game.

It would be pretty hard to drag code from other engineers with you, without outright bringing the source code along. If that happened, it would very much be illegal.

What's more likely to happen (and something I, and most other engineers, have done) is use their own solutions from previous work experience to develop new features. This has been tested (at least in Federal and California courts) and been found to be completely fine, as long as it's not in the end goal of infringing on protected property (e.g. developing an h264 codec/hardware blob to avoid the license).

On a similar note, I really hope that the AI companies that don't make it, but have invested a lot in curating and annotating high quality datasets, would release them to the public. Autonomous car and robotics companies in particular since that kind of data doesn't exist on the internet as abundantly as, say, natural language text.

I think you really need someone like Carmack to push for open source. It's rare.

IIRC it was someone else inside of id that pushed for source code release. He no longer works there though, which is a shame because the doom eternal engine is fantastic and I don't think anything else uses it.

TTimo?

It is an asset and in their minds worth something. Think old people and fine china dinner plates. They are convinced that they are valuable and refuse to throw it out

Copyright on intellectual property should cover this right? Shouldn't these corporations be forced to release the source code on that basis?

I'm confused. Why would they be forced to? Also, there's way more than copyright that covers this: trademarks, patents and trade secrets also play into it.

Yes, it WOULD make sens for copyright to work this way. A limited time monopoly in exchange for making sure the work actually enters the commons after that limited time. Unfortunately what we currently have is a much much worse deal for society.

Would then get requests, why does it not compile.

Simple 3 component apps don't even have CICD. Games? Mike built that binary and scp'd it on the box. I know we need it to build the map editor to build the next level, Don't ask him for a new build he's been in a bad mood his linux jamed, he may rebuild it, wait for Xmas.

This is not a problem at all. Most open source games have had their source code dumped over the wall and people figured out how to get it to build without further help from the original developer.

That's true.

The facts in my comment remain though. Can't raise ask for him for something that doesn't exist.

Software patents also come into view here. Doom 3 open-source version needed to have a change implemented so Carmack’s reverse algorithm was replaced by a different algorithm because the algorithm is patented by Creative.

Given a choice between money or control, expect executives to pick control.

It's a relatively small portion of game studios that are welcoming of mods. Often that is a legacy of the company being small and developer led.

Where is the money in this situation? Very unlikely this will have any impact on sales moving forward.

Is there a compilation of all the games that were open sourced?

Wikipedia has a list. Not sure how complete it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...

There's also another class of game, ones that can be fully decompiled. Such as most Unity games.

Those who care about preservation and community development do. Others don't care or their bosses don't even understand the idea and don't let them. They might think spending on lawyers to ensure opening the code up is handled correctly is an unnecessary expense because they only understand expenses for profit.

TL;DR: it's a non profit endeavor, and most of these companies don't grok the concept.

IP. To some extent liability. But really IP. It is an asset. Releasing source is giving away the asset. That's it. That is the reason.

Doom's code was released because Carmack had a materially different view of IP.

If you look at "open source/open core" threads for enterprise/non-game software, you can see the mindset.

They lost it.

It’s hard to relate to how that could happen nowdays with concise compilation processes and source control. But in times where compilation may be finicky, undocumented, and involve manually copying (via physical disk) from devs’ computers to a single computer for manual compilation, it’s easier to see how it could happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com