You don't have to give away the assets. ID gave away the source to Doom and Quake and people can still play them now. Yet here we are, 20 years later, and they're about the only studio that ever bothered.

[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 7 points 7 hours ago

Because doing so incurres a cost but no revenue.
It may require a review of the code, there's a risk of something being exposed that shouldn't have been (e.g. misuse of intellectualproperty).
There really aren't any benefits for the studio.

That's assuming they're even in business decade later, or even still have ownership.

[–] riplin@lemm.ee 17 points 10 hours ago

EA recently open sourced several Command and Conquer games.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 points 7 hours ago

Yeah but if they make some really cool game with that open source code they'll be playing that instead of our multi billion dollar AI slop!

Some mid and higher executive managers at gaming companies. Hell, at nearly all large companies