id open sourced the Doom3 engine, but didn't open the game assets. People ported it to linux. If you wanted to play doom3 on linux, you still legally needed to own the game to get the assets, you just had an open source way of running those assets on linux.
Open sourcing of the doom engine is basically why "this literal toaster runs doom" is a meme now.
Plenty of old enough games will just reverse engineer and rebuild the game engine open source from scratch. OpenMW comes to mind. And they even provide links on where to buy Morrowind in their FAQ, which even further helps drive sales.
> Do I need Morrowind to use OpenMW?
> Yes, if you wish to play Morrowind and its expansions. You must legally own Morrowind before you can use OpenMW to play Morrowind. OpenMW is a game engine recreation and only replaces the program. OpenMW does not come with any “content” or “asset” – namely the art, game data, and other copyrighted material that you need to play the game as designed by Bethesda Softworks. You have to provide this content yourself by installing Morrowind and then configuring OpenMW to use the existing installation.
Open sourcing a game engine does not mean that you have to make the game free.
Yes, so if you want to open source a legacy game of your company, you will need additional efforts to remove those game assets. So you can make sure that you do not have any legal troubles.
I think that's the reason why they do not want to open source their old games.
> I think that's the reason why they do not want to open source their old games.
In other words, either their finances are too tight to spare the effort, or they simply don't care about their games as works of artistic merit that might need to be preserved or even improved across generations of devices and operating systems, but rather just as products to earn money off of and then abandon.
Doesn't mean that you can't be charitable without being a charity.
> Why should they dedicate resources to making a very small group of people happy?
Because some might believe that the output of their work could be classified as a work of art in some ways and that it might be nice to preserve it.
> And yes, the games are products: they cost money to make and they make money when they are sold.
Sure! And if a game makes a sufficient amount of money, it wouldn't be a big deal to put some effort into doing nice things!
Of course, cynical attitudes and corporate behavior like what happened with a lot of Microsoft game studios suggest otherwise. The world quite sucks sometimes. Luckily, that's just due to the behavior of bad actors, not some inherent truth about the world being a profit-driven rat race, because that's of their making.
id open sourced the Doom3 engine, but didn't open the game assets. People ported it to linux. If you wanted to play doom3 on linux, you still legally needed to own the game to get the assets, you just had an open source way of running those assets on linux.
Open sourcing of the doom engine is basically why "this literal toaster runs doom" is a meme now.
Plenty of old enough games will just reverse engineer and rebuild the game engine open source from scratch. OpenMW comes to mind. And they even provide links on where to buy Morrowind in their FAQ, which even further helps drive sales.
> Do I need Morrowind to use OpenMW?
> Yes, if you wish to play Morrowind and its expansions. You must legally own Morrowind before you can use OpenMW to play Morrowind. OpenMW is a game engine recreation and only replaces the program. OpenMW does not come with any “content” or “asset” – namely the art, game data, and other copyrighted material that you need to play the game as designed by Bethesda Softworks. You have to provide this content yourself by installing Morrowind and then configuring OpenMW to use the existing installation.
Open sourcing a game engine does not mean that you have to make the game free.