[madflame991]

Was thinking the same - companies are extremely protective of their source code. How many games out there truly have unique/interesting/hard tech in them? I can think of Spore; I can think of a handful of rendering engines, maybe Stalker, Wow of course but not many more than that

[jokoon]

In tech, only ideas gets stolen. There are very few things that are really worth of being secret in software.

For games, hard work is just this: content (which has IP on it), debugging (which is specific to a certain game), handling GPUs (requires engineers, work is obsolete in 3 or 5 years), a few gameplay mechanics (cannot be patented).

Patents only matter when data is about some expensive, long term research that requires physical testing and labs, like a new molecule for a medicine, or some method or building a material.

Even when HL2 source code was stolen, it did not really matter.

[jhanschoo]

Battlefield's multiplayer code should qualify.

[jokoon]

Netcode technology is not a big subject worthy of secret.

Sure it's complex, but it's very use-case specific. Developers will often talk and share how they solve problems, so...