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Are there any examples of an "abandoned" game's fans successfully getting the game to be open-sourced? (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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And if so, what tactics did they use? Pester the devs? Crowdfunding to buy the rights to the game from the devs? Something else?

Edit: I'm more looking for instances of the actual original game being open-sourced through fan efforts or outright purchase, like how Blender was originally open-sourced as a result of a crowdfunding campaign. The open-source rewrites of games are awesome, but I don't have the skills to build a relatively elaborate game on my own. It's also not a popular game, more niche, really, so I'm just wondering what are the possibilities.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 5 days ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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"

[–] purplemonkeymad 3 points 3 days ago

Winamp dumping a bunch or proprietary information on GitHub is a good example of this.

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