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Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

It's a good sign that companies like Valve and Sony are releasing some of their tools to the public.

Perhaps they're feeling the pressure of more open/accessible tools like unity or unreal engine.

"Valve and Sony" are apples and oranges. Valve hasn't been a publisher (in the usual sense) or a platform creator until very recently. They've been a retailer and a developer. As a retailer, Valve has an incentive to grow the industry as a whole, and as a developer, they have an incentive to get people onto platforms that are easy for them to develop and sell products for.

They've chosen to tackle these interests by deliberately doing things "wrong" right from the beginning. SteamOS/Steambox is all about having an open, accessible platform, and the release of development tools is all about getting people to develop for this platform so that users will adopt it.

I'd be willing to generalize that it's nice to see fruits available.

Unity isn't exactly "open," it's actually closed source which can be a big pain if something goes wrong. Compared to traditional game development where usually you have access to all the source it is a big pain (for me at least).

> Compared to traditional game development where usually you have access to all the source it is a big pain (for me at least).

Which commercial engines do offer full source code access?

Any 3rd party engine used by a AAA game will have full source. Unreal Engine, Crytek, Source, etc. Sometimes those engines have cheap, no-source indie targeted licenses but the high end games paying the high price tag has source.

All of them? It's unheard of at a AAA development level to sell an engine without full source access; CryENGINE, Unreal, iD Tech, and Gamebryo all offer full source licenses, to name a few examples.

Thanks for the info.

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