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I don't see how one could possibly sanely think that I would find a copy of, say, Civilization 4 without models, textures, and sound to be useful.

Are you serious? It's a drop-in game engine. You could create a variation on Civilization 4 for the cost of your artists.

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And you'd have to release it under that same license (or a GPL compliant license), which means that anybody can do the same thing to you. If you improved the engine in some way, there's nothing stopping the makers of the original game to take your improved version, bundle some resources with it (sound, graphics) and release a new and improved version of their game.

Which means that the original corporation won't participate (unless forced to by accidentally including GPL'd code) because there are a lot of very good reasons for a corporation to not share their source code (ie, competitive advantage), and we've come full circle.

I think the point is that engines are a commodity, artwork and game logic, motion capture & sound effects are not.

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