As a game developer working for a large AAA studio myself - it's usually not because people don't want to, it's because companies are usually opposed to spending any money on things which aren't strictly necessary. The topic of open sourcing some of our older games(and I really do mean older, like 20 years plus) keeps coming up every now and then, but each time it's shut down because legal would need to do full assessment of everything surrounding it, like maybe we could release the code but not the assets like music or models used, in the grand scheme of things it wouldn't cost a lot or money or time, but in general anything above 0 on a project that won't bring any money in is too much(as sad as that is). And even the code itself might need cleaning up, 20 years ago the programming culture was very different and there is plenty of plainly inappropriate comments in the code and you'd want someone to make a full pass on the code and clean this up first. And finally - after 20 years we might not even have the code and/or full assets available. I spent a long time trying to find the source files used to render the cutscenes in the game but they are all gone. And we are 99% sure that the code we have for one of our games is not actually for the master version that shipped, but for a revision just before. So you could open source that, but it wouldn't build the same game that people are playing right now.
I can't speak for Epic here of course, but I imagine the reasoning here is somewhat similar - any developer put on this project is a developer not working on something else.
id software managed to pull it off. They used to open source their games a few years after they were released.
I do get it though, bigger companies tend to optimize very strongly towards reducing liability and maximizing quantifiable profits. Having even 1 employee spend a couple of days or a week combing through things as a quick pass could be time working on something else if you're making resource allocation decisions based on a spreadsheet. Personally I'd make a case that id's openness in everything (how their games can be modded and it being open sourced) had a really big impact on their success both for gaining diehard fans and profits.
>>id software managed to pull it off. They used to open source their games a few years after they were released.
Well yes, because it was John Carmack's personal belief that this is the right thing to do and he kept pushing for it every time. According to "Masters of Doom" it's something his legal team was always massively against, but being the company owner he could do it anyway. I don't think such strong belief in open source exists at the top of our company, so any such request has to be started from the bottom then be approved by 20 different layers of organisation - which makes it very difficult to actually happen.
>> Personally I'd make a case that id's openness in everything (how their games can be modded and it being open sourced) had a really big impact on their success both for gaining diehard fans and profits.
I agree, and such arguments have been made internally.
> won't bring any money in is too much(as sad as that is)
Depends on what your measure is: capitalistic -profit and shareholders above everything else- then yes, if you take a "good for society as a whole" into account not so much.
You know why artists don't usually accept payment for their work in "exposure", right? Because yes, it's not worthless, but it also doesn't pay the bills. I don't think the people in charge lack imagination - it's that the cost of legal + development work is a real thing that has to be balanced against other costs, while "PR Value" has to be specifically budgeted for.
Disclaimer: again, I'm not defending it - just pointing out that as a regular "grunt" developer I have very little impact on these things.
Even if it didn't cost them any effort to do so, it would still compete against their other games while producing no revenue. For the majority of companies, that's enough reason not to bother.
They do! My point is that open sourcing is a benefit for the people, even if the build instructions are missing. It's a major boost to not have to reverse engineer.
