A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
I’m not against it, but it’s not a silver bullet for game preservation. All game engines are unique. Some are heavily optimized for their target hardware. Just because you have access to original source code doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be easy to preserve it for future hardware.
I mean, there are games that got terrible ports despite dedicated teams working on it full time with access to original source code. It won’t be much easier for the fans taking this on as a hobby project during their evenings.
Only the games with most dedicated fans will get preserved for future generations.
That was true when every studio had their inhouse engine, optimized for their game types.
Today we have 100.000 times more power and “everyone” goes with a prebuilt engine so I don’t think your point is valud, any more at least.
That’s true, but there are still many games using in-house game engines.
God of War, Spider-Man, Elden Ring, GTA, Tears of the Kingdom, Doom Eternal, Halo Infinite, Destiny, Call of Duty, Cyberpunk, The Last of Us, Diablo 4, etc.
These are popular games that game into my mind. I don’t think game preservation should be limited to Unreal games.
And also, modern gaming platforms are all very similar. Since last gen XBOX and PlayStation have very similar hardware to both each other and to normal PCs and the Switch is very similar to many Android devices. The wild times where console manufacturers designed crazy custom chips that were hard to port to and from are over and thus the engineers tend to also be more agreeable with different platforms.