this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Well, source code is not sth that you "crack", you can only reverse engineer it (I think it was done with Doom, also OpenRA) or steal it from the company's servers. The use for it is also rather niche, so the risk vs gains ratio is not attractive enough to feed dedicated websites. You can also look at fully open source games like 0AD and check out what they did!
Edit: I stand corrected (thrice); Doom was indeed open-sourced, not reverse engineered. Thanks for pointing out!
No Doom was made open source, same with most of the old Id games.
I was once at a talk by someone in that company and he straight up said that open sourcing it was a mistake. I assume because that meant they couldn't sell us a thousand versions of it like Skyrim.
No word of whether its ongoing popularity was at all caused by open sourcing it.
There's no way going open source has done anything but help Doom. I guarantee they've made more money from people buying their old games for the WADs to play with source ports and mods than they've lost money to things like Freedoom.
The engine is Open Source, not the game itself. You still need to buy it.
The game and the engine are both open source. The game's assets just aren't freely available, so you still need an official WAD or an asset replacement pack like Freedoom.