Hacker News Reader

Comment by mackman | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand who would buy this. If you’re a game developer buying stolen code isn’t going to help you. Most of their titles are offline focused so I don’t see value in using the code to write cheats. I could see someone who hates them paying for email to release and damage the company but even that seems thin.

Also having worked in games i had a chuckle when I saw the “test framework” folder in Gwent and my first thought was “hmm probably fake then.”

View on HN

Someone who doesn't have to respect copyright law could use it to make their own game like it, saving years of effort. It'd be hard getting up to speed on it, but it could be worth it.

If you're in the market that doesn't respect copyright law there's a surprise for you - no one will buy legal copies of your game either, and it will be banned everywhere else.

Also code for the game itself means almost nothing without the tooling to produce assets for it. It could be written for scratch but then....just.....use unreal or unity? Pirate copies if you really don't care. Like, I work in games development and in house engines are incredibly inflexible, they are made for one game only usually and it's a titanic amount of effort to use them for anything else. You could probably use the Witcher engine to make a crappy clone of Witcher, but you're not going to use the engine for anything else.

> If you're in the market that doesn't respect copyright law there's a surprise for you - no one will buy legal copies of your game either, and it will be banned everywhere else.

Considering it's closed source I suspect it could get quite far before anyone notices. Also, people will buy legal copies, you over estimate how moral people are. Remember most of us shop on Amazon even tho we know it's terrible. And the money from those copies will go to CD Projekt Red.

> in house engines are incredibly inflexible, they are made for one game only usually and it's a titanic amount of effort to use them for anything else

Hah, one of the reasons I left the industry was I was frustrated that we were supposed to build the sequel to our game using a different custom engine intended for a different genre of game.

Sounds like EA and Frostbite.

That wasn't the one I was involved in but I suppose it's not surprising there's more examples.

Bethesda built a Fallout multiplayer game on their existing single player engine. "Minecraft alpha"-tier exploits and bugs where in the "finished" game and a lot of them were game breaking.

I could see someone making a knockoff version of Gwent to sell on Google Play. In terms of the Red Engine code... the custom engine I'm familiar with was a nightmare in terms of the asset build pipeline and lack of documentation. If you're planning on ripping off a custom engine to bootstrap your game I would highly recommend just using Unity or UE.

I'm not sure reverse engineering the mechanics and custom engine of a game infamous for terrible AI, stability issues and bugs and experience-degrading optimisations provides the best starting point for making a new game...

Particularly not when there are properly documented, stable and widely used game engines your devs are probably already familiar with available for no-up front fee.

Cyberpunk is not CDPR’s only game.

True, but it's pretty good evidence that access to CDPR's assets doesn't make it easy to get things right, even with the team that built them and the full toolchain. And the reports seem to suggest the source code for Cyberpunk and Witcher 3 is being auctioned separately, with Gwent already in the wild

That makes the lack of quality assurance even sadder.

You shipped any open world 3d games lately?

Have you seen how prolific copyright infringement is in china.

Compile cyberpunk, stick a couple of new assets and a new name on it and sell ot for $5. I guarantee it would sell

I don't see any one spending 1M.

There is some value though, a game dev don't need to copy all of it. Sub routines or component especially not in the UI, could save some dev some money. You could also learn a lot from the workings of the src code.

Value survived the source leak, ultimately the brand and experience is what worth money, plenty of open source projects make money.

True, and with $1M you could have a serious discussion with CDPR about licensing the bits you want.

Corporations put a lot of effort into avoiding leaks of their source code. Compared to the amount of AAA game projects, actual leaks happen rarely.

I can see "competitors" smelling value in buying source code of a project that generated a lot of profit.

I agree with you that the actual value is not that high, but I can nonetheless imagine people willing to pay a lot for it.

> hmm probably fake then

could check bae897295e09f309fa35ea4fcec7674c05357589

Reply on news.ycombinator.com