[mattnewport]

The article mentions asset stores / packs as part of the democratization but that is also often the biggest barrier to open sourcing games. Solo or small indie developers often rely on asset stores for at least part of their content and that usually means they can't open source their entire game even if they wanted to as licenses for assets usually do not allow for redistribution in this form.

If you want to open source a game you generally need to plan for it from the start and only use assets that you fully own or that have licenses that allow redistribution.

You can open source just the code but this is limited in what it allows others to do in terms of contributing to or remixing the game. Even learning from the code is limited if you don't have access to the assets such that you can run the code and make changes.

[solardev]

It's the id software model, isn't it? Open source the code, allow mods, encourage an ecosystem that anyone can learn from. And if they want the original assets instead of subbing in their own, they can buy a copy of the game and use those with their modified code.

They can still distribute their mod and other players of the original game will already have the shared assets.

Any new assets can have their own licensing terms.

I've run into similar situations with open sourcing non game code too. I can open source the code I wrote, but not branded images and trademarked assets that designers made. So we just subbed the assets with placeholders. Everything still worked, it just looked different.

With games, though, that becomes harder when something like a level is both an asset and non trivial to replace, and its design is often more unique than the engine itself. Think something like Portal, which is a joy not necessarily because of the Source engine, but because of the great level design and balance.

Just interesting to think about. I'd love to see more open games.

[mattnewport]

It is the id model, and it's not without value, it's just short of what I'd really call an "open source game" since so much of a game is about the assets, levels, etc. and not just the code.

I think id's open source code has been great for lots of reasons. I just think there is untapped potential in "fully" open source games where all the assets (including the source assets like Blender files and not just the intermediate formats like .fbx) are open source as well as the code as that makes it easier for people to experiment, learn and remix the content.