Open Sourcing MMOs 137
The Stropp's World blog has an interesting editorial of the pros and cons for open sourcing MMOs, especially those that have "died." Stropp examines both sides of the issue and makes some compelling arguments. "So, there are some good reasons for a company to open source the game that it is soon to retire, and there are a couple of good reasons against. What to do? If opening up the client is not an option, open up the server code. This would allow the open source community to take the software, install it on a community server and open it up to the fans. Other players might want to grab the source and create their own private servers, perhaps with different rule sets for PvP and the like. The life of the game could be extended for years, supporting a thriving community."
What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work.
Kinda defeats the point of playing..
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work. Kinda defeats the point of playing..
Wouldn't it be less of a hassle to read the Player's Guide, if such was your goal?
UO? (Score:5, Interesting)
Didn't they do this with UO?
Oh, wait, they reverse engineered the protocol, made a ton of implementations of the server, and the game is still played. There was even a new official client version in 2007, according to the Wikipedia page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online [wikipedia.org]
I'd love to play Galaxies or Matrix Online, but I'd never pay for them, just like I never paid for UO, yet played it religiously for three years.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
I really wish I could go out and buy the Auto Assault client (pretty despicable that stores still sell a worthless client to a long dead MMO) and play on a private server somewhere, or better yet, host my own. What could possibly benefit the publisher more than continuing to profit from game a game after the official service has been cancelled? What do they have to lose?
The article shows the difference. (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the reasons to play a FPS (most updated graphics, best new gameplay features) aren't the same reasons to play a MMO (building a character, seeing time invested result in virtual properties). The 5-year old MMO can compete very well with recently released MMO's (Warcraft vs AoC).
This is why MMO's aren't OS'd, and probably won't be.
MMO = Massively Multiplayer (Score:5, Interesting)
Games such as Quake, Counter-Strike, etc, work just fine because they are meant to be split into 8 or 16 or 32 player chunks. MMO's are meant to be played by literally thousands of players. How do you group for an instance if only 100 people even have accounts? You certainly can't raid. How do you do large scale PvP battles? You can't. How do you have an economy when only 1 person is selling something and the other 5 people don't want it?
My second point is this..
BANDWIDTH!
WoW takes about 2-4KBps per person of bandwidth. Multiply that by lets say a minimum of 100 people we're talking 200-400KBps dedicated and this doesn't allow for growth. Pretty sure my upstream on my home connection is capped at 64KBps. I don't want to think about paying for a business class line to let people play a dying game for free.
There is a reason MMO's will stay corporate, it takes a lot of money to keep them running. Yes, you can have offshoots, just like people run private WoW servers, but those aren't MMO, they are toys, novelties, something the masses will never join.
Re:UO? (Score:4, Interesting)
The question that pops into my mind after reading your post is:
Would you shop at "Ye Ole' Nike Blacksmith"? Would you venture forth to save Prince Sony? Would you have the intestinal fortitude to sit at an inn with architectural features and iconography identical to that of a Pizza Hut?
If there were integrated marketing merged into these free games, would you still be willing to play them (for free of course). Knowing that your viewing of integrated advertisement would be offsetting the server side costs?
-Rick
Re:Same problem with opening ANY large project (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, a lot of games use third party libraries/middleware, such as Bink, Miles Sound System, Renderware [wikipedia.org], Gamebryo [wikipedia.org] etc.
It wouldn't be very useful to have the game without those libraries. The middleware systems are usually quite extensive and producing an open source version of those would be quite hard, especially since a lot of games depend on very specific versions and configurations of the actual middleware --- or even modifications to the actual library code! Since the middleware handles pretty much all the graphics/sound/etc. and leaves only the game logic to the game developer, it is quite unlikely that the game would ever get to a playable state without a significant effort from the OSS community.
Re:Tradewars 2000 (...Wow, I'm old) (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually BOUGHT Tradewars to run on a BBS I never started.. but a friend has a BBS he's running through Telnet, gave him the license.
However I'm pretty sure it has not been open sourced, although if it has I'd love to see the link. Last I remember there was a telnet version or something, and it cost $.
Ah the joys of colonizing planets, buying big ships, and having it all gone in a turn when you accidently go to an unknown sector with some dudes planetary defense cannon, or if you had the add on, the borg :P
I miss the BBS days :'(
Err, forgot to link (Score:3, Interesting)
WorldForge [worldforge.org]