Sho wrote on Mar 30, 2015, 22:20:
That's great. Game development is the last large software industry that generally doesn't open source very much (there's the odd engine here and there nowadays, EA has thrown some of its libs over the fence in an ungraceful fashion, and Valve has gotten into open dev tools for SteamOS/Linux), but stands to benefit a lot from collaborating on infrastructure that it's a very suitable dev methodology for.
I think, although I'm not 100%, that all that 3rd party middleware doesn't help the open sourcing much.
Tim Sweeney says as much here, If we can get to a point where all of that can be convinced to open up ancient, legacy versions of their middleware, it might convince pubs/devs to do that same. Unlikely, but anyway.
It's a shame, as if we could get to a point where open-sourcing was seen as a natural part of the life cycle of a game, then we could also get to a point where your old games on Steam, GOG, Origin, whatever, continue to get updates, ports and fixes long into the future; running a legacy games catalogue becomes about cherry picking patches contributed to the repo.
Sho wrote on Mar 30, 2015, 22:20:
That said, the hard work only starts after you open up a codebase. Open source projects rise and fall mainly with their approach to community and governance.
Quite.
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Rockstar made $1 billion in 3 days with GTAV, yet they can't find the budget to port RDR to PC.