Game Source Code Collection

I think this is being fueled by movie and game outliers today being able to achieve their first $billion in their first week. That outsized ROI on gaming, like movies, completely changes the calculus on what old stuff is worth today. FAANG will throw billions into making games as soon as their movie pipelines are sorted.

Game develipers often don't own the thengames they are working on. Nost publishing contracts transfer the rights to the publisher and all the studio gets is the money. So, the devs cannot do anything after they ar eww done with a project. It is up to the publishers to decide what to do with it. And these guys are bean counters fist, otherwise they wouldn't be able to run the core of their business the way they do (that is risk distribution between individual game projects). So unless you can give them a solid business case for releasing anything for free, they won't do it. So you need to prove to them iwith decent numbers that this works. Good luck with that.

That said, it's still up to the copyright holder on what to disclose, and pretty sure distributing a binary based upon stolen copyrighted source would still be a violation, but I'm not a lawyer. I certainly wouldn't do it...

That's because once someone has experience, they can 3x their salary outside the industry.

I cannot claim to know why they did this, but my educated/experienced guess as a long-time game developer is that _someone_ thought it would be best for the teams not to rely upon existing projects when creating new ones.

Imagine if painters always started from their previous painting rather than a blank canvas; or if a home developer always started with prefabs of their previous home. You'd get American suburbs and Ikea prints.

you could elaborate?

• We (archive.org) can choose to either take in these DRMed works, archive them, and publish them online for public consumption (with their DRM intact); or we can refuse the DRMed works at the door, and thus have them unavailable for public consumption, also leaving them unpreserved; or we can archive the DRMed works, but just not publish them (again leaving them unavailable to the public.) The one thing we can't do, legally, is to just ignore the wishes of the rightsholders and put up a DRM-less version of the content for public consumption. The rights-holders are still out there to sue us. So we have to pick one of the other three options.

• One day, the rights will expire or the rights holder will disappear, and the work will enter the public domain.

• If we had earlier rejected even archiving the work because of its DRM (from some principled moral stance, as you seem to be suggesting), then at the time the work enters the public domain, we won't have a copy, and would have to then acquire one. It might be impossible to acquire a copy to preserve at that point.

• So, it’s better to acquire a copy now, under license; and then just crack the work out of its DRM later once the work becomes abandonware. (As the Archive.org staff have proven happy to do and/or support, with e.g. 4am’s work on the Apple II software archive.)

• Plus, even if we did wait to acquire the work after its rights lapsed, we would likely have to crack it anyway. Rightsholders that go to the trouble to re-release their own works without DRM are pretty rare. Some rightsholders are so lazy that, in “anniversary” re-releases of their products, they use the community’s cracked copy! So it’s not like we’re making more work for ourselves by choosing to take in DRMed works and then crack them eventually. It’s just how it has to go, to ever archive these works at all. The likelihood of ever just "coming across" a non-DRMed version of the work at some point in the future is practically nil. (It would be like hoping that if you left an aged painting on the market long enough, it would just de-varnish and repair itself.)

• And, of course, we can start on the DRM-cracking process as soon as we get the work, and keep the de-DRMed version as the canonical version to do preservation work against, as long as that’s not the version we make visible to the public (until the work becomes abandonware.) Museums and libraries have many works in “private archives”, and those archives still hold value to the public: academics can usually access them for studies, for example, as this explicitly falls under Fair Use. But more importantly, the private preservation of works that can't be preserved in public, ensures that they're preserved at all.

I hope that makes it clear why either the first or the third options (give the public the DRMed version; or preserve the DRMed version but don't publish it) are better than the "refuse DRMed content at the door" approach. Which of those other two options you favor is up to you. Personally I'd rather the public have some access to this rights-bound content rather than none.