Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
List of commercial video games with later released source code
Summary
This is a list of commercial video games with later released available source code. The source code of these commercially developed and distributed video games is available to the public or the games' communities.
Commercial video games are typically developed as proprietary closed source software products, with the source code treated as a trade secret (unlike open-source video games). When there is no more expected revenue, these games enter the end-of-life as a product with no support or availability for the game's users and community, becoming abandoned.
In several of the cases listed here, the game's developers released the source code expressly to prevent their work from becoming abandonware. Such source code is often released under varying (free and non-free, commercial and non-commercial) software licenses to the games' communities or the public; artwork and data are often released under a different license than the source code, as the copyright situation is different or more complicated. The source code may be pushed by the developers to public repositories (e.g. SourceForge or GitHub), or given to selected game community members, or sold with the game, or become available by other means.
Source code availability in whatever form allows the games' communities to study how the game works, make modifications, and provide technical support themselves when the official support has ended, e.g. with unofficial patches to fix bugs or source ports to make the game compatible with new platforms.
Some developers that have released their source code have concluded that, in general terms, such action has not been harmful and even beneficial, among them Alec Holowka (Aquaria), Adam Saltsman (Canabalt), John Carmack (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake), Brian Hook (Quake II), and Terry Cavanagh (VVVVVV). Wolfire Games also noted (along with Saltsman) that releasing the source code didn't reduce sales. However, releasing the source code may and has led to clones using the original proprietary assets from the game, with two notable examples of games having clones thanks to the source release being Canabalt and Lugaru HD.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.