It's always been the case that, aside from the employees of a defunct game developer, it's the players who lose out when a game developer turns out the lights in the server room.
Not only do they lose the characters they've created when the game servers go down, they also lose the relationships that they've built up in the game, and the sense of community that MMO games encourage.
Over the years there have been a bunch of MMO games that have closed down. Earth and Beyond, Auto Assault, and Asheron's Call 2, to name but a few. None of the developers or publishers behind these games, to my knowledge have ever released their MMO game as open source, despite, in some cases, calls from the player community to do so.
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Several Reasons To Open Source
Despite the arguments against open sourcing a soon to be canceled MMO, there are several good reasons to open source a soon-to-be-closed game.
- Ongoing sales of the client. This would have to be one of the more persuasive arguments for a company to release the code as open source. Money. As we've seen with Id Software, opening up the source doesn't mean opening up all the assets, which means that in order to play the game, the players are still going to have to buy the client. The developer/publisher still makes sales without having to go to the expense of running servers.
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German Questioned Over Gamer's Murder
