Dead Games

> new ideas were expressed through some kind of mod

Roblox and Minecraft have exceptional modding scenes, eclipsing most previous generations by far?

A Roblox modder created lethal company, a game that outsold call of duty. Minecraft modders are building literal computers inside the game.

If we take modding as a pathway to learning engineering and programming, not only to producing games, then these are highly successful.

Wish it wasn't so rare to get good modding tools. From your examples, Valves commitment to their SDKs (for CS) and Warcraft's WorldEdit (DotA) are both nice ecosystems to work in.

It kinda feels like unreal engine and unity are the new baseline "games" -- but not games -- and the games are mods on top of all that existing machinery?

Making a game used to mean writing an engine too and that just isn't true anymore it seems.

> I am too old for Roblox

Roblox is a gaming platform. Popular among kids, yes, but that's like saying you're too old for Youtube. You can absolutely find a game with like-minded and older players.

Companies shouldn't be forced to support their games for long. Only for the duration of the copyright. (/s, but consider the now aligned incentives for sensible copyright duration limits !)

Probably competes too closely with whatever pay2win/lootbox microtransaction heavy shitware 40k games I keep seeing YouTube ads for.

It must get backed up somewhere - I read recently that a huge cache of Thomas the Tank Engine assets were leaked online (not sure which incarnation but obviously a semi-recent one).

I'd guess at least the big studios preserve for sequels, re-releases, remasters etc but who knows what the retention is.

Oh and there was a similar big leak of My Little Pony stuff too I believe - I couldn't remember which other show it was yesterday.

His company also created Rust which ranks #8 on steamdb/mutliplayer games. They are currently in the process of making s&box on the source 2 engine. I'm just putting this out there, nobody works harder in gaming than Facepunch. Thank you Garry!

Man is one of my heroes. I grew up on the FP forum idolizing him

Articles on his blog about Unity are on point! e.g. https://garry.net/posts/unity-can-get-fucked and several others leading up to it

I think you are underselling licensing issues, especially of third party libraries I can imagine for things like ui, music, physics, etc.

I don't think the licensing is really the excuse. It is more of the fact that studios have put tons and tons of effort towards those assets including their creativity towards that partly finished end-goal. They most likely want to keep it in their possession if some point tides turn and they are able to finish the game or even small part of it.

And I totally understand that. After sacrificing years and years + thousands/tens of thousands euros towards project, you really don't want to see it taken by other people and putting their own creative ideas on top of your work(that can be potentially used later).

Licensing is a huge issue. If the game is on consoles, that's a whole big chunk of code that has to be removed from the open source version. Console SDKs are usually under very heavy NDAs -- even indirect references to how the SDK works might get you into legal hot waters. Many middlewares, even for stuff like compression, are also usually under pretty punitive contracts. Older games had fewer of those problems, but practically speaking most well known releases in the last 25 years would have to have someone go through and sanitize the codebase, and that can be extremely time consuming. And depending on the specific game, stripping out all that stuff might leave behind just a useless skeleton of code because so many of the basic components that make up the game engine are third-party. Imagine getting access to a game's source code where the entire animation, loading, physics, rendering and many other small systems had been ripped out. You're usually not left with a whole lot of other stuff in those situations.

> The excuse is usually vague licensing reasons but, sadly, I bet the real mentality is "if I/we can't profit from my/our hard work, then nobody should enjoy it."

I'm 100% certain that the primary reason boils down to "we don't have the rights to all of the source code, and we don't want to deal with any of the options for moving forward."

As sibling comment points out, a lot of console SDKs are pretty heavy in the "this code must never be open-sourced" space (hell, even talking about what's in them can run afoul of NDAs). But it goes beyond that. Building assets might require a suite of proprietary tools and custom extensions for those tools, where your ability to release those extensions may be legally unsound. Many games will have several libraries, not all of them open source (and some of them probably under pretty strict don't-even-think-about-asking-us rules--can't imagine many anticheat or DRM packages are going to say yes to allowing source to be released).

If the company doesn't have the rights to large chunks of the source code, their options boil down to:

* Release just the bits they have the rights to, which isn't going to be compilable. And hope that nobody complains about residual references to their code in the released stuff (litigation risk!).

* Spend time going through the code to sanitize references to unreleasable code, but still just release the not-working code drop.

* Do the above, but also replace the unreleasable bits with working releasable bits.

* Do nothing.

One option involves no work and no risk. One option involves minimal work but incorporates small-to-medium risk, but also sacrifices much of the benefits of open-sourcing (there is likely to be community blowback if the product is unusable!). Two options involve a lot more work to mitigate the risk.

It's going to be rare to find the corporation that's going to go for the no work/no risk route. If you want to change that, the best way is to create legal mechanisms to make the no work option much higher risk than the other options.

The source code is likely not even terribly useful, for a game that was never released. What this is talking about are the assets (sounds, 3D models, textures, etc) which could still be quite useful.

And that's why they don't just give them away (unless it's a very small studio/individual effort). Many "how it was made" histories of games describe how they used assets developed for a previous game or otherwise not used.

Could also be that open-sourcing something is probably lots of work.

I've seen internal projects that were open-sourced and there was a ton of time and effort involved to get across the finish line.

Probably anything involving more than one person make exponentially more work, let alone licensing/etc

Honestly assets can be extracted from a lot of older games, the issue is usually licensing.

Nightdive has a good writeup somewhere of the hoops they have gone through.

They say it usually boils down to:

"Mr Rights holder, can you license this property to us"

"No I dont know if we own that property, we would need to check paper records and that costs money"

"Ok, but then you wouldnt go out of your way to sue us if we did resurrect this old game"

"No if we saw you making money from it we would definitely spend the money to figure out if we had a viable lawsuit"

Lighting and post-processing is a big tell too for those types of games. Unreal Engine has a default motion blur effect which is extremely obvious

Once you've stared at them enough, the default PBR shaders in both Unity and Unreal combined with their environment/post-processing defaults make it very easy to spot.

Presumably this is Garry Neuman of Garry’s Mod fame. I love that he’s looking to keep these assets from being lost.