From the archive
Open-Sourcing Your Game While It's Still Popular
On December 6, 2011, Adam Saltsman looked back at a year of Canabalt's published source, at a time when the game still earned more than half of the studio's monthly revenue. Wikipedia's articles on Canabalt and on commercial games with later released source code cite the post.
Semi Secret is an independent publication, not the studio that made these games; this page is an unofficial account written from the public record.
What happened
- Other developers built their own iOS games on the engine code, among them Connectrode from Austin.
- Sales stayed strong all year; the public source did not get in the way of selling the game.
- Copies built from the source were taken down with copyright notices, and news coverage of the latest one brought a spike in sales worth a few hundred dollars.
- Talks about commercial ports got simpler: the studio linked interested companies to the source and named the revenue share it wanted.
- Hobbyists ported the game to other machines, the most striking a Commodore 64 version.
Aquaria's side of the story
The post quotes Alec Holowka of Bit Blot, who had opened the source of Aquaria, the Independent Games Festival grand prize winner. He was scared his messy code would embarrass him, until Ryan C. Gordon, who made Aquaria's Linux port, convinced him it would work out. The community fixed small bugs quickly and improved its modding. A PSP port by Andrew Church showed an iPad version was possible, and he asked Andrew to make it.
The conclusion
Not every game should be open-sourced, the post said, but for both studios it worked three ways: they kept earning, people learned from the code and contributed to it, and some got their own start in commercial development through it.