Open Sourcing MMOs

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."

Comments

Why on earth would they do that?

[kellyb9]

Why would they want to extend the life of their game? They want you to buy the new one!

UO?

[Rinisari]

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

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:Security trough obscurity

[Chris Mattern]

I'm willing to bet most MMOs trust the client to some extent, in order to reduce their load. Open Sourcing them might not be such a good idea.

You massively overestimate the power of security by obscurity and massively underestimate the power of reverse engineering. Just about every instance of server-client gaming where the server trusts the client has resulted in subverted clients to cheat using that trust. Modern MMOs (and any other server-client games) do *not* trust their clients.

MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[rotide]

MMO means it is a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Open sourcing would be decentralizing the servers. But that also means that each time you run a new instance, you split the player base. World of Warcraft already does this with Realms, but this is a hardware limitation issue. You can't squeeze 10 million players on one box, the CPU would simply die. But if 100 people want to "keep a game alive" by running their own servers, you now effictively split the populace 100 ways. Stops being Massively Multiplayer really quickly.

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.

Same problem with opening ANY large project

[Drogo007]

They don't open source old games probably for the exact same reason any large legacy project isn't automatically open sourced - licensing issues. There are probably large swathes of code they don't have the right to release in such a manner. Game companies very rarely write all their own code from the ground up. Instead they take some basic building blocks (graphics engine, sound engine, network engine) and build around that.

In some cases, they simply take an existing game engine, license it and add their own content. Interestingly enough, one of the few game companies that has a reputation for opening the source on their old games is also one of the few game companies with a reputation for completely rewriting the engine from scratch every time (a.k.a. ID Software)

Even if you somehow wave your magic wand and make all the licensing issues in the engine code disappear, you're still left with the same issue for art assets: There are often a large number of licensed art assets (textures, music, etc etc) in a game as well.

Worldforge

[JSBiff]

There is an Open Source MMO project, launched over ten years ago (I remember it was announced on Slashdot) called WorldForge. It, so far, has failed to really go anywhere. Don't get me wrong, it has stayed alive, and they do have some tech they've built. But nothing that's really much of a game. They've had various things that I would describe as 'prototypes' or 'tech demos' - I check in on them every year or two to see what they have.

      WorldForge has it's developers, but for whatever reason, it never seemed to reach that critical mass where there were a lot of developers, artists, writers, etc who really jumped in and started building a true MMO with it, that I can tell. It's interesting, but for whatever reason, it seems like an MMO is just something that, at least so far, doesn't seem to work well as an Open Source project.