A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
On the other hand if the code from the 5 year old release was open source but the updates from today was still closed source for another 5 years that would encourage continual improvement addition content to differentiate from the community releases.
It wouldn’t be limited to community releases, though. Other companies could poach the source code for themselves, and I doubt that’s something easy to regulate.
True, “community” might not be the right term.
But nonetheless if the OG developer structures their license so that each version becomes open source after 5 years then people publishing that as is or creating forks will always be a few steps behind the official release.
Of course if the title has any kind of community support that crowd sourced effort has the potential to outshine the OG developer, its important they time their license to give themselves a head start.
I think Friday Night Funkin’ will turn into a cautionary tale here, by releasing their game with much hype and open sourcing their code the first 7 weeks in 2020-21 they allowed community to really flourish. The player community has created content and then content that builds on and responds to that content (both narratively and mechanically) for several cycles now. Much of this content is now viewed as core to the FnF experience by players but much of it is also now built around other people’s IP (video games, TV shows, music, etc)
At the same time The Funkin’ Crew has been quietly working on Friday Night Funkin’: The Full Ass Game but I suspect that as a commercial game bound by the resources of single dev team and the rule of law they will be hard pressed to compete with the community they spawned.
While this is a win for remix culture it might not turn out as being the most prudent business decision. On the other hand they pulled off a two million dollar kickstarter so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯