Are there any examples of an "abandoned" game's fans successfully getting the game to be open-sourced?
-
And if so, what tactics did they use? Pester the devs? Crowdfunding to buy the rights to the game from the devs? Something else?
-
A [email protected] shared this topic
-
The history of city of heroes might interest you.
-
Star Wars Galaxies.
-
Thank you!
-
Thank you!
-
Came here to point out CoH!
-
Not quite the same, but Total Annihilation and Beyond All Reason. It wasn't abandonware, but more like after Total Annihilation hit success, rights were sold and resold and Atari as the final owner squandered every opportunity to do more with the engine and the franchise.
The tactics were essentially receating a better engine with Spring, as the sort of newly open source upgraded version of the engine the same people built 10 years earlier. Taylor Swift did the same thing.
-
Warzone 2100 is an RTS that fans petitioned a company to release as FLOSS, after support had ended.
-
OpenTTD or OpenRTC possibly could qualify here?
-
The developer of Terraria promised to open source the canceled sequel if a petition could get enough signatures but then it did and he didn't release the code
-
Thanks! That sounds more like a rewriting of the engine though?
-
Thank you!
-
Thanks! Those sound more like rewrites though?
-
Thanks! That's lame!
-
Yeah I think technically they did re-write them, but the actual gameplay, graphics, and music is identical to the original
-
That's cool. That would be something to consider if the developer will absolutely not entertain the idea.
-
-
Plenty of devs think it's easier than it is. A ton of games are built on proprietary tools, and then you get into legal hot water on whether you can even give away things like the soundtrack or assets you bought like stock sound effects.
I wouldn't be surprised if they looked at it after the petition and thought "wait, I actually can't open source this"
-
Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2)
But, it's not really abandoned anymore. The developers are FINALLY making an official sequel!
The sequel is not open source, but UQM/SC2 is.
This happened in the early 2000s, but I think they found the source code to a port of the game and said "We haven't earned any money from sales of this game in a decade [and buying digital games wasn't really a thing yet, as people generally believed that anything digital shouldn't have a price], so let's release this to the community to open source as long as they do all the reverse porting and support!"
-
Does rewriting the game count? https://2009scape.org/
