In my experience working with devs at game studios (i’m a sysadmin/infra engineer type by trade), it is rarely them that is so against open sourcing code, or giving fans of the game the tools needed to keep it going on their own once the devs move on. Most of the devs I have dealt with would like nothing more than to see the thing they created live on and be enjoyed by people, even if they are not personally getting paid for it 10 years down the line.
It is nearly always the executives looking to make sure no one manages to enjoy something the people that work for them created without the c-suite getting paid for it first that is the road block.
I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.
It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.
Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.
In my experience working with devs at game studios (i’m a sysadmin/infra engineer type by trade), it is rarely them that is so against open sourcing code, or giving fans of the game the tools needed to keep it going on their own once the devs move on. Most of the devs I have dealt with would like nothing more than to see the thing they created live on and be enjoyed by people, even if they are not personally getting paid for it 10 years down the line.
It is nearly always the executives looking to make sure no one manages to enjoy something the people that work for them created without the c-suite getting paid for it first that is the road block.
I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.
It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.
Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.