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Are there any examples of an "abandoned" game's fans successfully getting the game to be open-sourced? (lemm.ee)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by turtle@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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And if so, what tactics did they use? Pester the devs? Crowdfunding to buy the rights to the game from the devs? Something else?

Edit: I'm more looking for instances of the actual original game being open-sourced through fan efforts or outright purchase, like how Blender was originally open-sourced as a result of a crowdfunding campaign. The open-source rewrites of games are awesome, but I don't have the skills to build a relatively elaborate game on my own. It's also not a popular game, more niche, really, so I'm just wondering what are the possibilities.

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[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 10 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2)

But, it's not really abandoned anymore. The developers are FINALLY making an official sequel!

The sequel

The sequel is not open source, but UQM/SC2 is.

This happened in the early 2000s, but I think they found the source code to a port of the game and said "We haven't earned any money from sales of this game in a decade [and buying digital games wasn't really a thing yet, as people generally believed that anything digital shouldn't have a price], so let's release this to the community to open source as long as they do all the reverse porting and support!"

[–] Krejall@ttrpg.network 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This was my favorite game as a kid. Doing fan-art and a D&D campaign about it for years got me hired on as an artist for the new one! It's gonna be wild.

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago

Congrats!! As I'm sure you can imagine, I am incredibly excited for COI!

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