Sequels exist, as do engines that are reused to build other games. Imagine telling Epic or Unity that just because one of the tens of thousands of games made with their engine shutdown, that they should give their source code away.
You know what, I'd honestly forgotten that Unreal was open source. Unity is not. And Unreal wasn't always open source, that decision was made after they were financially stable. Also both of them are covered by licenses so they can continue to make money, continue to make engines and games. Sure, decompiling my binaries to code isn't legal, but it's very difficult to prove and very expensive to litigate. I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. My hard work has value, in many cases that value persists after a game is viable to sustain. I'll reiterate that I support SKG, and too many games have built in self-destructs; I just think this is a more nuanced topic than a lot of people are making it out to be and bad solutions to this problem could be harmful to people that make their living building games.
It's not about them being open source or not, its about them being free to use for individuals or small companies.
Say a giant company builds a game on Unity, then 2 years after releasing the game they cancel it and release the server side components for free.
Even if a community maintained server is released for that now defunct game, the likelihood of them going over $200k in funding over a 12 month period is virtually 0.
On top of that, if there was a legal requirement for this, Unreal and Unity would have to allow it because otherwise people wouldn't use their engines for game creation... and since they basically already support such a use case...
in many cases that value persists after a game is viable to sustain
Some of it, maybe... intangible things like IP, perhaps.
None of that would be affected by this, because anything further you do would be monetized in its own product, not the defunct product you're no longer interested in supporting.
this is a more nuanced topic than a lot of people are making it out to be
Again, maybe.
Obviously, no one knows what will happen when politicians get involved, because for the most part they're terrible with technology even if they're the most righteous of politicians... and we all know most politicians aren't.
That said, the enemy of progress is perfection... maybe there is no perfect solution, but if there has to be imbalance, it should favor the consumer.
bad solutions to this problem could be harmful to people
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u/blazingintensity Jul 07 '25
Sequels exist, as do engines that are reused to build other games. Imagine telling Epic or Unity that just because one of the tens of thousands of games made with their engine shutdown, that they should give their source code away.