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I've never seen an open source AAA game, perhaps it's impossible go get enough money to pay the developers and designers of a AAA game with an open source project.

The social benefit is that some members of the society can get fun from a AAA game if they want.




There's a few. ID software[0] open source their games, but require the assets to actually build and run the game (which you obtain by buying the game). Epic [1] have open sourced Unreal Tournament (note I'm not sure on the licensing, just that the code is available). Natural Selection [2] source code was released

Star wars Jedi Knight [3] had the source released.

Note that all the AAA games that I'm aware of that have been open sourced are older games, I don't know of any in development AAA games that are open source.

[0] https://github.com/id-Software [1] https://github.com/EpicGames/ [2] http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/natural-selection-source-code-r... [3] https://github.com/grayj/Jedi-Academy


ID, at least while Carmack was there, was very very good about releasing their last-gen engine tech once all licensees had published their games. A whole lot of people learned about how to do game development from those things.

Unknown Worlds only released the source code for the NS1 mod for Half-Life--and as Valve has yet to release the Gold Src source code, that's of questionable utility.





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