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What are some of the obstacles of making an existing game open source? (leminal.space)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Context: I saw a post a while about Paradox Interactive cancelling their life simulation game Life By You and someone commented saying they wish Paradox Interactive would release what they've completed under an open source license. Follow up comments said it wasn't feasible largely due to a Russian nesting doll of licenses that wouldn't be compatible.

Question: What would be some obstacles in making a modern stereotypical AAA or indie game open source? Or even just segments for it for that matter?

This would be ignoring the financial impact. It would be like CD PROJEKT RED making Cyberpunk 2077 as open source as possible as a an action of good will.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

One obstacle may be the assets. Im not a lawyer.

But you pay for a license to use a piece of music in a commercial software. To make the game open source would imply the music is also something others can use, which wasn't yours to give away.

Music is easy to rip out.

But think about the headaches. Is this 3D model that you purchased and slightly edited licensed in that way? Is this UI for the options page? What about this sound effect? It gets even worse with code dependencies. You paid to use this library...

It's now this massive headache to itemize every single thing and determine the origin, as well as if it's something you can release as part of your open source. And if you do it incorrectly, you can get sued.