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Open Source Fallout 1,2?
Nitth
Member UncommonPosts: 3,904
Some people may or not be aware that the licence to the original fallout games has been transferred to Bethesda from interplay studios recently, And while zenimax isnt very popular at the moment this could be a great opportunity for fans of the original games.
Zenimax, through rallying by its former employee John Carmack has a had a long history of releasing the ID tech engine source code as opensource/GPL after many years of commercial success back to the fans to do an assortment of mods and porting.
So it seems to me at least that this studio may be forward thinking enough to do the same with the fallout games. Games, which are 17 YEARS OLD and up until recently have been given away FREE from such sites as GOG.
With The recent advent of kickstarter it might be possible to bribe Bethesda into Opening the source...If the price is right. On the condition that Bethesda honored the arrangement you could start a campaign with the premise of say.. $1m to convert the current licence.
Seems like a no brainier to me, Release the code(even partially) and Retain the rights to assets. People still need to buy the game to use the source and they cant use the engine for commercial purposes if under GPL.
At $1m, that's the equivalent of selling 66,889 copies at current price in 30 a day kick starter campaign.
Thoughts?
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Comments
Zenimax will never release the source code for Fallout, especially after their long court battle with Interplay to get the rights back for a Fallout MMO.
Even if they release the source they still retain the IP, Licence and rights.
So you cant just release a game called "Falloutt" with the Fallout code base because that would infringe on the IP. You would also have no rights to assets and have to release your work opensource as well.
Atm they are sitting on a game everybody even remotely interested in has already bought.. years ago probably. And imo they stand to make more money (and PR) doing this than letting the sales dribble in.
Besides this would not stop then selling copies anyway as you need to legally obtain assets to compile the game.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development