Seems unlikely for them of open source the engine as they’re switching away from it. Why give away all that dev time and effort and not gain any benefit from it? While I think it’s the correct move to open source it and let the community take over development, a for profit company is never gonna do that unless they would benefit. Like open sourcing the engine while still using it so you get a wider amount of devs throwing their efforts in. So for a company, they get “free” dev work, and in return for those same devs get to use the engine on whatever project they want without licensing issues. Open sourcing abandoned or depreciated software, especially game engines, really is a dead legacy of a simpler time in computing. Gone are the days of companies like ID open sourcing their engines and games once their release cycle was done. With the advent of always online and games as a service, we’ll never seen major companies ever release old games as open source since even a 40 year old game can be monetized in a modern digital store.
Why give away all that dev time and effort and not gain any benefit from it?
Why not, though? Sunk costs and all that. World gets more open code, which is not a bad thing. They don’t really lose much and they would gain goodwill, even if they said they are not going to maintain it.
Seems unlikely for them of open source the engine as they’re switching away from it. Why give away all that dev time and effort and not gain any benefit from it? While I think it’s the correct move to open source it and let the community take over development, a for profit company is never gonna do that unless they would benefit. Like open sourcing the engine while still using it so you get a wider amount of devs throwing their efforts in. So for a company, they get “free” dev work, and in return for those same devs get to use the engine on whatever project they want without licensing issues. Open sourcing abandoned or depreciated software, especially game engines, really is a dead legacy of a simpler time in computing. Gone are the days of companies like ID open sourcing their engines and games once their release cycle was done. With the advent of always online and games as a service, we’ll never seen major companies ever release old games as open source since even a 40 year old game can be monetized in a modern digital store.
Why not, though? Sunk costs and all that. World gets more open code, which is not a bad thing. They don’t really lose much and they would gain goodwill, even if they said they are not going to maintain it.