Last week, Cyan Worlds revealed that they were turning their upcoming Myst Online restoration into an open source project, putting the future of the game into the hands of its fans and aspiring designers/coders/modelers/etc. all over the world.
Curious as to what people working on other MMOs thought of the move (and of open source MMOs in general), I reached out to a few at all of the top MMO studios. Josh Drescher, Assistant Producer at EA Mythic (Warhammer Online) had this to say.
First of all, I don't speak for EA or Mythic here in any official capacity, so don't take anything I say as a statement of corporate policy.
As far as I am aware, the last version of Myst Online was using components that were either developed internally (Plasma) or that had freeware versions (PhysX). Most MMOs these days aren't created from the ground up by a given studio. Graphics engines are licensed from third parties, things like Speed Tree, AI pathing solutions and physics engines often are too.
As a result, it would be difficult in many cases to release something that's actually useful to the community without the additional consent of numerous other parties. Add to that situations like ours, where the actual CONTENT of the game is based on a licensed property (Games Workshop's Warhammer IP), and it becomes nearly impossible to release anything to the Open Source community.
On a macro level, releasing games into the public domain seems unlikely to ever become a widespread practice. While it's certainly a nice gesture, it's tough to see past the significant downsides it would present in most cases. The rapid expansion in the availability and power of mobile devices has given new life to old products, often DECADES after they were last commercially viable. In turn, developers are rightly hesitant to relinquish control of properties that may have further viability in the future.
I think the things most likely to be released into Open Source in the future will continue to be technical (like older engines) rather than full games.
Image credit GGL Wire
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